Brazil

(for Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Language, in press)

Raquel Freitag & Ataliba Castilho

When studying Portuguese in Brazil, an unquiet feeling emerges when comparing the
continental size of this country and its single official language, Portuguese, with other
countries where Portuguese is also spoken, such as Guinea Bissau in Africa, which has a
population equivalent to the smallest Brazilian state, Sergipe, but where more than 30
languages coexist. This is the outcome of a strong linguistic planning that started during
the Portuguese colonization period, as shown in Chapter 19, and which remains today.

If language policy was declared during the colonization period, as when Marquis de
Pombal banned the língua geral from being spoken in Brazilian territory in the 17th
century, today language policy is practiced in the funding biases. In other words, what is
known as “Brazilian Portuguese” (as opposed to European Portuguese) is a result of
research projects that support the descriptions of the language.

This chapter recovers the path that the Portuguese language in Brazil has been following
to achieve the status of “Brazilian Portuguese”, presenting how the unique features that
characterize Brazilian Portuguese and differentiate it from other national varieties of
Portuguese. This is not an easy task: it requires patching together pieces from a socio-
history that involves different contributions from people from over 500 years and being
aware that there are still many gaps.

First of all, “Português no Brasil”, “Português do Brasil”, “Português Brasileiro” or even

just “Língua Brasileira” are labels that scholars have used to refer to the same language.
Each of these labels evokes a linguistic paradigm, a linguistic ideology, and a historical
period, as well as an explanation for its emergence. In this chapter, BP encompasses all
these labels.

There are different periodization proposals for the socio-history of BP that, in common,
consider migration flows and political and economic milestones that have an impact on
the number of speakers and power relations between languages. However, another
criterion better explains the facts and the power relations that lead to the predominance
of one label over another: education and the production of a literate culture associated
with it.

In the period from the 16th to the 18th century, BP was labeled “Português no Brasil”, a
language still totally grounded in Portuguese values. Education at this time was still the
primacy of the metropolis, leaving Brazil with only the study of the first letters and
generating a lack of locally produced literate culture.

In the 19th century, after Brazil’s independence, the Portuguese language was established
as the majority language by the number of speakers, at the same time that the first
grammars began to establish a Brazilian linguistic norm (still very much based on the
Portuguese of the metropolis). This period also saw the founding of the first higher
education schools in Brazil, such as the School of Surgery of Bahia, in 1808, and the law
schools of São Paulo and Olinda, in 1827, as well as a literary culture with more national
characteristics, as in the Romantic literary movement. The label “Português do Brasil”
emerges from this period.

Starting in the second half of the 20th century, with the strengthening of national literary
movements, and also with the first training courses for linguists in Brazil and the return
of scholars who had studied in other countries, results of collective research projects
began to delineate what is now called “Português Brasileiro”, without the preposition
“de” (of). These research projects have provided empirical and evidence-based support in
the framework of linguistic theories to characterize BP, showing how it differs from
European Portuguese (EP).

1. Peoples and languages

It is widely believed that Portuguese is the single language that connects all the people of
Brazil, the outcome of Portuguese colonization in contact with the indigenous peoples
who already lived here before the discovery and the enslaved African peoples who were
brought here after the discovery. The role attributed to each of these peoples is at the same
time the result of a social bias and a theoretical perspective, and impacts the kind of
contribution that their languages are supposed to have made to BP (this can be seen in
creolistic and drift approaches to explain how BP was formed, in section 3).

The process of multilingualism to monolingualism in Brazil is the result of declared and

practiced language policy actions. Languages are spoken by people. And people are
different from each other. Traditionally, the people who comprised Brazil and thus BP
are depicted as three distinct groups: the Portuguese, the indigenous natives, and the
enslaved Africans.

The implementation of the Portuguese language in Brazil took place from eight irradiating
poles located on the Brazilian coast or nearby (Castilho, 2010):

• four poles in the 16th century: São Vicente and São Paulo (1530, 1554), Olinda
and Recife (1535), Salvador (1549), Rio de Janeiro (1557);
• two poles in the 17th century: São Luís do Maranhão (1612) and Belém (1616);
• two poles in the 18th century: Ilha do Desterro (now named Florianópolis) (1738)
and Porto dos Casais (now called Porto Alegre) (1752).

Little is known about the characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese in the 16th century. Clues
come from the reports of European travelers, as Hans Staden, André Thevet, and Jean de
Léry tell of borrowing from indigenous languages, especially to describe what is
characteristic of the land (Noll, 1999).

It is hypothesized that the Portuguese settlers who came to Brazil at the time
predominantly originated from the Center-South of Portugal (Teyssier, 1997, Cardeira,
2006), given the following phonological features existing nowadays in BP:

1) absolute occurrence of pre-dorso-dental [s,z], as in “paço” (palace) and “cozer”

(to cook) , typical of South of Portugal, and the absence of the apicoalveolar [s,z],
as in “pa[ts]o” and “co[dz]er”;
 2) monophtongization of the diphthong [ey], as in “prim[e0]ro” (first), pronouced
[ây] in Northern Portugal, as in “prim[ây]ru”;
3) maintaining the distinction between /p/ and /b/, which are alternating
pronunciations in certain rural regions of Northern Portuguese, occurring both
“varrer” (to sweap) and “barrer”.

In the 18th century, people arrived from the Azores, the Portuguese islands overseas that
at that time already presented linguistic characteristics different from those of the
metropolis. Some of these characteristics can still be found today on the coast of Santa
Catarina, such as the alveopalatal realization of /s/ in coda without diphthongization, as
well as in Porto Alegre.

Despite the number of irradiated poles, the number of Portuguese descendants was low
in comparison with the enslaved African and native peoples. Reports of demographic
estimates from that period show that at the end of the 16th century, the Brazilian
population was estimated at around 100,000 inhabitants, composed of 30,000 Portuguese
descendants and 70,000 enslaved Africans and natives. By the middle of the 17th century,
the Brazilian population was estimated at 184,000 inhabitants, comprising 74,000
Portuguese descendants and free natives, and 110,000 enslaved Africans and their
descendants (IBGE, 2000: 21).

In the early 19th century, the arrival of the royal court in Brazil and its settlement in the
city of Rio de Janeiro in 1808 promoted a major change in the Brazilian demographic
scenario, doubling the population (from 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants in the capital). At
that time, Rio de Janeiro was not only the capital of Brazil but the capital of the
Portuguese empire, which had fled from Europe because of the Napoleonic threat of war.
The arrival of the court expands the repertoire of access to cultural goods in Brazil,
previously restricted to religion. The first royal law for the opening of the ports and the
national press catalyzed the literate culture in Brazil at that time, followed by the
installation of the National Library, the first higher education courses, and the social life
of the court itself, promoted broader social changes, which also manifested themselves in
the language. However, the Portuguese language that arrived again in Rio de Janeiro was
not the same one that had arrived in the first flow: in the speech of the Portuguese that
arrived in Brazil together with the royal court, the /s/ in coda was no longer sibilant as it
was then, assuming the palatalized feature so characteristic of Rio de Janeiro speech
today.

Although it stayed for less than 20 years, the Portuguese royal court brought about major
changes in the consolidation of Portuguese in Brazil. The proclamation of Brazil's
independence in 1822 started a period of the constitution of the Brazilian identity based
on Portuguese values. Despite that, during the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), even
descendants of enslaved African and native peoples predominated in the country.

The fact is that “Portuguese people” was not a homogeneous group: “new Christians”
(jews converted by force of the inquisition court), degredates (undesirable people
expatriated to overseas lands), courtesans of Lisbon, and Azorean island people
composed the whole label.

Besides that, Terra Brasilis was not unclaimed. When the first Portuguese people arrived
in Brazil, between one and six million indigenous people populated the territory, speaking
about 1,200 different languages (Rodrigues, 2005). These languages comprise two large
branches, the Macro-Tupi branch and the Macro-Jê branch, each one with its own
families, languages, and dialects, in addition to 20 isolated languages, not classified by
branch.1

The indigenous populations, generally designated as Tupinambás by the first chroniclers,

who certainly referred to the tribes that inhabited the coast, were decimated. The purpose
of exploiting the labor force of the natives in the economic cycles in the new Portuguese
colony was not successful. There is no consensus on how many indigenous languages are
spoken in Brazil today. The 2010 version of the UNESCO’s Atlas of the World's
Languages in Danger indicates 190 languages. In the same year, the official Brazilian
census indicated the existence of 274 indigenous languages (IBGE, 2010). This number
is different from that known by Fundação Nacional do Índio – National Indigenous
Foundation (FUNAI), which is 154. There are still indigenous peoples who have not yet
been contacted, which further increases the unawareness about the natives of the land.

The reduction of 1,200 to less than 200 languages was a glotocide following a genocide.
If at the time of the discovery the estimated population was at least one million indigenous
people, the last census revealed that 896,000 people declared or considered themselves
indigenous (IBGE, 2010).

The Africans were another group of people that contributed to the anthropological profile
of Brazil. From 1538 to 1855, eighteen million enslaved Africans were brought in.2 These
people integrate two cultures, Bantu and Sudanese cultures. Bantu culture is divided into
two groups: the Western Group, originated from the Congo and Angola, and the Eastern
Group, originated from Mozambique, Tanganyika, and the Lakes region. Its
representatives were settled in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Maranhão,
Pernambuco and Alagoas. Sudanese culture comprises the Fulá, the Mandinga, the
Hausá, the Fanti-Ashanti, the Ewê, and the Yoruba or Nagô, originated from the West
African coast: Sudan, Senegal, Guinea, the Gold Coast, Daomé, and Nigeria. They settled
mainly in Bahia, came in smaller numbers than the Bantu, two centuries later.

As with the Portuguese, there were also flows of arrivals in Brazil of enslaved people
brought from Africa:

• the Guinea flow, in the 16th century, with Sudanese.

• the Congo and Angola flows, in the 17th, with Bantu.
• the Mina coast flow, with Sudanese, in the first half of 18th century, and in the
second half, the flow from Benim to Bahia.
• a mixed flow in the 19th century, with predominance from Angola and
Mozambique (Bonvini, 2008).

1 This classification is not a consensus among scholars (see Rodrigues 1986, Seki 1999 and chapter 30). It
is still unclear what are varieties or dialects of a language are as well as the concept of different
languages.
2
Darcy Ribeiro (1995) justifies a “hypothetical demography” for the calculation of the number of enslaved
Africans brought to Brazil, so great is the disparity of the numbers found in the bibliography. According to
this author, for example, the number eighteen of falls to about seven million individuals.
Enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil to work in the sugar and mining economic
cycles. After the prohibition of external trafficking in 1850, ceasing new entries of slaves
from Africa into Brazil, internal trafficking persisted, motivated by the change to the
economic cycle of coffee. The enslaved people did both heavy manual labor and
housework. The segregationist social organization designated the big house for the
whites, the masters, and the senzala for the enslaved.

Even after the abolishment of slavery in Brazil (which happened only after Independece,
in 1888), the social situation of the descendants of enslaved Africans has not fully
improved yet. People of color or race black and brown (descendants of enslaved Africans
and indigenous peoples) are neglected in the employment market (they occupy only 30%
of management positions), underrepresented in politics (only 25% of federal congress
members declare themselves to be of color or race black or brown), and targets of violence
(for every 100,000 young people, the homicide rate for white people is 34, while the rate
for people of color or race black or brown is 98.5) (IBGE, 2019).

However, it was not only these languages that were present in Brazilian territory in the
last 500 years. Spanish, French, Dutch, and English were also present in colonial Brazil,
even though they have explicitly left their heritage with the formation of BP (or we are
still looking for them).

Monolingualism in Iberian America is also the result of political decisions. To ensure the
dominance of territories overseas, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas,
which defined an imaginary line that cut across the territory of Brazil between Pará and
Santa Catarina, separating Portuguese and Hispanic lands. However, this did not
guarantee the Portuguese (and thus their language) exclusive control over these lands.
The Antarctic France project in Rio de Janeiro (1555–1567) and Equinoctial France in
Maranhão (1612–1615), the Dutch invasions in Bahia in 1624, and Pernambuco (1630-
1653) illustrated this. English corsairs were present on the Brazilian coast during the
colonial period. The malleability of the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494,
which divided the lands overseas between Spain and Portugal, made the presence of
Spaniards in the South of Brazil constant (and only recently, the contact between
Portuguese and Spanish was officially recognized, with the status of heritage language
being known as Portunhol).

In the second half of the 19th century, there was a great expansion of Brazilian crops,
combined with the liberation of slaves and serious episodes of hunger in Europe. A strong
migration of Europeans to the Americas began, and Brazil became the destination of
Italian, Spanish, German, and many Portuguese, notably since 1870. In the 20th century,
Europeans and Japanese running away from the war arrived in Brazil, and new diasporas
in the 21st century brought in to Brazil other peoples with other languages, like Haitians,
Africans, and South Americans, with Bolivian and Venezuelan, and others from the
Middle East and Asia. Internal migration is also present, following the change from a
rural into an urban country in the last 70 years (see chapter 29).

Towards an explanation of the origins of BP, it is important to consider that the

Portuguese arrived in Brazil in different periods and were formed by different groups.
The great diversity of native indigenous peoples that existed before the arrival of the
Portuguese was also accompanied by the consequent diversity of languages spoken by
them. Likewise, enslaved Africans came from different peoples of Africa and at different
periods. Diversity was constitutive of the linguistic reality of these groups that formed
BP, whether through a language that was already standardized but with particular
characteristics, such as Portuguese, or through the so-called general languages.

2. Multilinguism, general languages, and language exchanges in Brazil

It was supposed that because enslaved Africans had been subjected to more intense
contact with the scarce white population, compared to the indigenous, there was more
evidence of the effects of African languages in BP than of indigenous languages.
Nevertheless, the native indigenous peoples that the Portuguese found in Brazil were not
isolated peoples waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, there were already well-
established exchange and trade routes between indigenous nations. The multilingual
melting pot of native indigenous peoples can usually be explained by language formation
processes.

The mobility on the territory explains the development of indigenous-based general

languages. It is possible to think that the different families of indigenous languages have
undergone processes of change and neutralization of features that led to the two koines
(Siegel, 1985), or “línguas gerais” (general languages), corresponding to the two
branches of Brazilian indigenous languages. Following Rodrigues (1993:85), general
languages are not pidgins or creoles, “but continuations of indigenous languages that
came to be spoken by the mestices of indigenous men and women”. So, general languages
serve to establish contacts.

According to Mattos e Silva (2004), the label general language has been used to refer to
more than one language situation in Brazil.

1) as the General Brazilian language, spoken by mestizos and white Brazilians

since the 19th century. This general language is neither African nor indigenous,
“but a continuation of Portuguese” (Mattos e Silva, 2004: 21). It was the general
language of “caipira” Brazil at that time. This expression appears in colonial
documentation when referring to “speaking the general language”, “using the
general language,” and a “simplified Portuguese, with interference from
indigenous languages and also from African languages” (Mattos e Silva, 2004: 95).
2) As indigenous languages, a category that includes the General Amazonian
Language, based on Tupinambá, the remnant of which is the Nheengatu (still
spoken in North Brazil); the “São Paulo General Language, based on Tupiniquim
and Guarani; and the Cariri-based General Language, which is widespread in the
country’s Northeastern (Mattos e Silva, 2004: 81).
3) As “language created by the Jesuits”, general language means the missionary
Tupi “manufactured” by the Jesuits (Camara Jr., 1963).3 The Jesuits, based on
Tupi, a language spoken by the indigenous populations of the Brazilian coast,

3
The Jesuits were priests connected to the Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church, which
arrived in Brazil in 1549 and was expelled by the Marquis of Pombal in the second half of the 18th century.
The activities developed by the Jesuits in missions were aimed at the economic exploration of the labor
force of the indigenous natives. The first grammar written in Brazil is the “Arte de grammatica da lingoa
mais usada na costa do Brasil” (The art of grammar of the most spoken language on the coast of Brazil), in
1595, written by the Jesuit José de Anchieta.
 composed of similar dialects, became a language of communication to be used as
a language of catechesis. The general language, the missionary Tupi, was
characterized as a Tupi stripped of “its most typical phonological and grammatical
traits to be adapted to the conscientiousness of whites; so, the Portuguese acted in
it, impressively, as a ‘superstratum’ “ (Camara Jr. 1963:76).
4) And as “Bantu languages” spoken in the mining zone (Mattos e Silva, 2004:
97).

Concerning African languages, Bonvini (2008) explains that the contact between
Portuguese and African languages started before the enslaved were brought to Brazil as
a result of the close interaction between Portuguese slave merchants and the captives on
the African continent. Also, according to Bonvini (2008), the waiting of the enslaved
before being transported to Brazil and during the travel led to a situation of forced
coexistence of speakers of different but typologically close languages. This situation
probably led to the development of a general language, Quimbundo, even before the
arrival in Brazil.

In the 17th century, Quimbundo was spoken in Brazil, with a specific grammar. In the 18th
century, with mining, one more vehicular language emerged, the Mina language (Bonvini
and Petter, 1998). And also another vehicular language, Iorubá, was spoken in Brazil,
around Bahia. After the abolition of slavery, the languages of African origin that were
present in Brazil became extinct, with the remaining sources of resistance in specific
contexts, such as cult or secret languages (Bonvini, 2008).

The linguistic complexity of the African peoples, associated with the Portuguese practice
of mixing their ethnicities with those of the indigenous peoples to hinder revolts, must
have given rise, after the 17th century, to a “dialect of the senzalas”, as hypothesized by
Castro (1980, 2001).

These general languages were widely spoken by the majority of the population in the 17th
century, not only among indigenous people and enslaved people but among mestizos and
even Portuguese people and their descendants. Brazil, until the 17th century, was a
multilingual territory, and Portuguese was not even the hegemonic language. And the
mobility in a large territory explains the remaining linguistic features of general languages
in BP and also explains the spread of linguistic features of the Portuguese language itself.

In the second half of the 17th century, the movements of “entradas”, expeditions in search
of precious metals, and “bandeiras”, expeditions to capture indigenous people as labor,
but also to hunt runaway African slaves, contributed significantly not only to expanding
the Portuguese territorial domain beyond the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas, but also to
disseminating linguistic features.4

4
The family structure of the bandeirantes reveals the contact between the general languages and
Portuguese at the time (Oliveira, 2000). Based on documentary evidence from inventories, it is known that
the bandeirantes’wives were white women. This way, they would speak Portuguese at home with their
younger children. In the long expeditions to the backland, their husbands would speak Portuguese with the
few whites who accompanied them and the General Language of São Paulo with the indigenous. It suggests
a linguistic situation organized by native speakers (the indigenous villagers, the families of the colonizers,
and the officials of the administration) and by bilingual speakers (the bandeirantes, in their interaction with
the indigenous). This finding contradicts the frequent statement that people would speak Portuguese
in São Paulo only from the end of the 18th century.
The “tropeiros” (troopers) also played an important role in the language exchanges
between the Southeast, South, and Center-West regions of Brazil. While the
“bandeirantes” (who made “bandeiras”) had the objective of hunting and reward, the
“tropeiros” drove troops of horses or mules to transport goods and cattle over long
distances. In the 18th century, small villages began to appear along the troop routes, in
places where the troopers stopped to exchange goods and where cattle could graze.
This multilingual scenario in Brazil started to change in 1758, with the publication of a
law that banned the use of any language other than Portuguese in the colony. This was an
action of Marquis of Pombal aiming to guarantee the dominance of the Brazilian territory
for the Portuguese crown in a scenario of threats not only from the Spanish crown, since
the limits of the Treaty of Tordesillas were extrapolated, but also from the Church
(Garcia, 2007). The Jesuits, who knew the general languages of Brazil, were also
expelled.5
Brazil has thus started to lose its linguistic diversity in a more intensified way, moving to
a phase of monolingualism of the Portuguese language as the hegemonic language. At
the same time, it is the point at which Portuguese began to acquire the characteristics that
lead us to BP.

3. What is the BP?

If the first impressions about the language of Brazil were collected from travelers’
narratives and later, by the voices of intellectuals and writers, it was from the period of
independence in 1822, when a strong nationalism turned into the development of a feeling
of brazilianness that the first records of a Brazilian language, or the Portuguese language
in Brazil, began to take on a systematic character.
Why is BP the way it is? Why is it different from EP and how did it happen? These
questions have been asked with more insistently since Brazil became independent of
Portugal in 1822. The nationalism that characterized the time called for Brazilians to be
independent linguistically as well. The first formulator of this concern was Domingos
Borges de Barros, the Viscount of Pedra Branca, in a text he wrote for the Ethnographic
Atlas of the Globe, prepared by Adrien Balbi (1824–1825) (Castilho, 2010). Since then,
describing, historicizing, and interpreting PB has become a recurring theme in national
culture. The respective agendas took at least three directions:

• Does BP have its current characteristics given the influence it has received from
indigenous and African languages?

• Is BP a natural extension of EP, reflecting what Portuguese was in Portugal in

the 15th century?

• Is BP a pluricentric language with different patterns?

Stems for these explanations are due to evidence from collective projects to investigate
Brazilian Portuguese, in dialectological, historical, usage-based, and sociolinguistic
approaches.

5
In the Northern region, the General Amazonian Language, or Nheengatu, survives to these days, even in
cities, and it has been recognized by the National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity in 2014.
The dialectal approaches were initially dedicated to the survey of lexical characteristics,
producing glossaries and dictionaries (Ferreira and Cardoso, 1994). A second phase is
marked by the description of dialects, such as Amadeu Amaral’s “O dialeto caipira”
(1920), Antenor Nascentes’ “O linguajar carioca” (1922) and Mario Marroquim’s “A
língua do Nordeste” (1934). Many years before perceptual dialectology was characterized
as a research tool (Preston, 2002), Antenor Nascentes, based on his observations during
intense traveling throughout Brazil (he was a state employee for 10 years before starting
his academic career), organized the first Brazilian dialectological map (Nascentes, 1953),
which is still being used as a reference by current researchers.
Studies using the methodology of geolinguistics have been employed to produce
standardized maps that detail the linguistic patterns of dialectal areas in Brazil, organized
in the first regional linguistic atlases of Brazil, such as “Atlas prévio dos falares bahianos”
(Rossi et al., 1963), and “Atlas Linguístico de Sergipe” (Ferreira et al., 1987), among
others, around the group led by Nelson Rossi. Based on these experiences, the Atlas
Linguístico do Brasil (ALiB) project, led by Suzana Cardoso and Jacyra Mota, gathers
under the same methodology a lot of research material that draft a concrete idea of the
geographical variation of BP (Cardoso et al, 2014).
The historical approach has provided strong evidence of the distance between the
language of Brazil and that of Portugal. The first studies systematically organized into a
collective project date from the early 1990s, with the “Programa de Estudos da História
do Português” – Program for the Study of the History of the Portuguese Language
(PROHPOR), led by Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva. This group has contributed a
description of 14th-century Portuguese, based on medieval manuscripts. These results
have been important in tracing the history of BP.
In 1997, on Ataliba Castilho’s initiative, the “Projeto Nacional para a História do
Português Brasileiro” – National Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese (PHPB)
was established. It was not only an institutional research group, but a group of national
representations, with teams in the different Brazilian states, as PROHPOR, and “Projeto
de História do Português de São Paulo” – São Paulo Portuguese History Project (PHPP)
(Castilho, 2011), engaged in the same common objective: to constitute diachronic corpora
from documents of various kinds written in Brazil, from the 16th century on, in order to
study linguistic changes and reconstruct the social linguistic history of Brazil. The
PHPB’s work is vast and constantly updated, as the task is still far from being completed
(Castilho, 2018, Castilho 2019a, b, Cyrino and Torres Morais, 2018, Andrade and
Gomes, 2018, Lopes, 2018, Ilari and Basso, 2019).
Sociolinguistic contributions to BP started with the project “Competências Básicas do
Português” – Portuguese Basic Skills (1977), in which Miriam Lemle and Antony Naro
(with Gregory Guy’s collaboration) studied the ways of speech of people who participated
in MOBRAL, a Brazilian adult literacy program. Following this, Anthony Naro
coordinated the first major sociolinguistic project, the Programa de Estudos da Língua
em Uso – Program for Studies on Language Use (PEUL), in Rio de Janeiro, and this
initiative soon spread throughout the country. Replications of the PEUL methodology for
data collection, as in the “Variação Linguística na Região Sul do Brasil” – Linguistic
Variation in South of Brazil (VARSUL) project (Bisol and Monaretto, 2016), have served
as inspiration for the description of BP from a sociolinguistic perspective in different
regions of Brazil (Freitag, 2016).
Without a doubt, the Norma Urbana Culta NURC project is what most strongly impacted
the profiling of BP. It was initially thought to be part of a larger project, “Proyecto de
Estudio del Habla Culta de las Principales Ciudades de Hispanoamérica” – Project for
the Study of the Educated Speech of the Major Cities of Latin America, proposed by Juan
M. Lope Blanch, from Mexico, and implemented in Brazil by Nelson Rossi. It consisted
of recording urban speech to support the description of phonetic and phonological,
grammatical, and lexical aspects. In Brazil, five capitals were documented, São Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Salvador, and Recife, providing a spoken corpus of more
than 400 hours of recordings in different speech styles. This material was the basis for
the Gramática do Português Falado – Grammar of Spoken Portuguese project, which
mobilized a large number of linguists who discussed the constitutive aspects of spoken
BP (Castilho, 1990, 1993, Ilari, 1992, Castilho and Basílio, 1996, Kato, 1996, Koch,
1996, Moura Neves, 1999, Abaurre and Rodrigues, 2003), and whose consolidation of
the results obtained is a reference for the construction of the spoken text (Jubran and
Koch, Orgs. 2006, Jubran, 2015), the sentence construction (Kato and Nascimento, 2009,
2015), open class words (Ilari, 2014), closed class words (Ilari, 2015), the construction of
complex clauses (Moura Neves, 2016), the morphological construction of the word
(Rodrigues and Alves, 2015), the phonological construction of the word (Abaurre, 2013).
Recently digitized (Oliveira Jr, 2016), NURC corpus is the basis for contemporary
grammars of Brazilian Portuguese (Castilho, 2010).
These major projects have shaped generations of Brazilian linguists who continue the
great task of describing what BP is and seeking explanations for its origins.

3.1 The creolistic approach

A creole origin for Brazilian Portuguese is the most widely discussed, at different
moments in the history of BP and the history of linguistic ideas. In a pioneering text on
Portuguese-based creole, Adolfo Coelho states that “several characteristic particularities
of creole dialects are repeated in Brazil” (Coelho 1881: 43), launching for the first time
the theory of the creole base of BP. Grammarian João Ribeiro (1889) reinforced the
creolist hypothesis.
Serafim da Silva Neto (1951) also believed that a creole base would explain the
differences between BP and EP, which began to increase from the 19th century onwards.
According to him, this base introduced innovations in BP, while, in a reverse movement,
rural talks manifested a conservative tendency. If this hypothesis is correct, the
importance of urban speaking in contemporary Brazil will neutralize the conservative
trend, accelerating its distancing from the EP.
Glastone Chaves de Melo (1946) added an explanation not yet proven: that the
remarkable uniformity of BP is due to the diffusion of creole talk generated on the coast,
and taken inland by the “bandeiras” of São Paulo. Révah (1963) finds it difficult that
creoles consisting of distinct contacts (Portuguese ~ indigenous, Portuguese ~ African)
could have amalgamated, giving rise to a uniform linguistic variety such as BP.
Contemporary studies have shown that this uniformity is not that strong.
From a sociolinguistic approach, Gregory Guy (1981) argued that BP has an African base.
In his work, he excludes the possibility of an indigenous creole since the native Brazilians
did not develop with the Portuguese the types of social relationships and situations that
usually lead to creolization. He established a care plan to examine the creolistic
hypothesis, which unfolds into two discussion orders: the search for linguistic evidence
and the social history of Portuguese creolization.
Since creole is a contact language, it will keep the typical marks of acquisition of a second
language: regularization of flexion, the predominance of morphemes-roots, and the
reduction of derivational complexity. Guy (1981) warns that it is necessary to discard
here the spontaneous changes, of universal character, focusing on those specific to the
creolization process: phonological features such as the loss of {–s} and the denasalization
of vowels and final diphthongs, common to the history of Portuguese and that of other
Romance languages, cannot be attributed to a creole base.
The same does not occur with morphological and syntactic traits such as nominal and
verbal agreement, particularly the marking of the plural in the first term of the expression,
as in “a-s criança-” (the children), and the preservation of verbal agreement only in cases
of morphological salience, as in “a criança é alta” (the kid is tall), compared to “os
menino- fala-” (the boys speak). In this case, the absence of agreement is due to the lack
of morphological salience between “fala” (he speaks) and “falam” (they speak). Guy
emphasizes that these cases have no precedents in the history of Portuguese or in that of
the Romance languages.
The last one provides indirect evidence for the creolist hypothesis, because, first, the rules
of the agreement were erased, disappearing the nominal and verbal agreement, and
second, in a second moment of decreolization, the rule was recovered, under certain
circumstances, such as the pluralization of the nominal phrase, pending on the order of
its constituents; followed by the verb-subject agreement, pending on the morphological
salience of the verb.
Guy (1981) adds that the solutions found by BP are documented in other creole varieties
in both Portuguese and Spanish. Moreover, in the Bantu and Iorubá languages, the plural
is marked by prefixes or clitics, always located at the beginning of the expression. Finally,
Guy brings other linguistic evidence deserving a more accurate analysis: the lexical
contribution of Africans, the disuse into which large parts of the verbal paradigm fell, and
the use of a not-declined reflexive particle, as in “nós se conhecemo- aqui” (have met
each other here), for example.
Concerning the Brazilian social organization, the crucial question is, according to Guy
(1981: 25), “how could Portuguese have prevented creolization”? By 1850, the country
had received 3,600,000 slaves, 38% of all the slave trade and nine times more than the
Africans taken to the United States. White Brazilians constituted a minority group.
Therefore, all conditions were met here for the formation of creole. It is supposed that the
decrement of the BP was lacking because of the massive Europeanization of the country,
which occurred mainly after the 20th century, during the 19th century, a fact that did not
occur in Haiti and Jamaica, where 90% of the population is still black today. Thus, we
had an atypical creolization framework, which led BP to a complex situation in its
linguistic development, neither typically creole, nor typically not creole.
Assuming a near-creole origin of BP, specifically for the popular variety of BP, one can
arrive at a unified explanation for the descriptions of the creolized rural dialects, which
still testifies to a highly creole stage of the popular variety, previously widely spread
throughout the territory. In sum, the popular BP would be a vestige of the creole phase.
Not everyone agrees with this explanation. Fernando Tarallo (1986) argues that the
decrement alleged by Guy would have led us back to EP, which cannot be proven.
BP would literally have to turn around and upside down. Subjects would have to start
being null again [...], while objects would have to start receiving clitic pronouns again. In
the case of subjects, the grammar of BP would have to leave its syntactic configuration
and begin to be more oriented to speech; concerning objects, the discursive variable
 would have to be replaced by a more syntactic orientation in its derivation. (Tarallo, 1986:
66)
Tarallo (1986: 36) reinforces that the creole hypothesis “should not remain on our
agenda” because BP, in its process of change, does not affect EP. If there had been a
creole language in Brazil, the Europeanization of the country that occurred in the 19th
century would have triggered a process of decrement, and today we would be talking, like
the Portuguese, what happened in Angola and Mozambique, for example.
Creolist studies resumed in strength in the 1990s. Alan Baxter and Dante Lucchesi
redefined creole from the point of view of social history as “a language born in special
socio-linguistic circumstances that lead to the acquisition of a first language, based on a
defective model of a second language” (Baxter and Lucchesi, 1997: 69). From the point
of view of their structure, they showed that “from the 1960s onward, the languages began
to insist on the fact that creole languages presented strong structural similarities, no matter
what languages were involved in their formation” (Baxter and Lucchesi, 1997: 70). They
mention the current definition of creole:
a process of irregular transmission from L2 to L1 in which L2 was altered due to problems
of access to the target language (i.e., the language of the dominant group) and possibly
the influence of the mother tongues of the speakers of this L2. In these circumstances, in
the development and the acquisition/creation of the new L1 (the potential Creole
language), innovations guided by universals and by other mother tongues present took
place. Innovations fill the gaps or opacities caused by the dilution of the acquisition
model. Such a process is variable. (Baxter and Lucchesi, 1997: 65)
The creole interpretation of BP is a strong temptation, an idea that goes on and comes
back. Negrão and Viotti (2011) claim that BP is not a creole, and this is a bias of an
eurocentric view of the language (in section 3.3).

3.2 The drift hypothesis

Another explanation for BP is that natural languages change continuously over time,
obeying any lines of force drawn by their structure. According to this point of view, BP
results from a natural change, explained by evolutionary trends that had already begun in
the Iberian Peninsula, and with this, it could be said that BP is a continuation of Archaic
Portuguese. On this linguistic basis, adjustments would be made, continuing a self-
derived drift constituted at that stage of the language. In this sense, the question to be
asked is not why BP has taken different directions concerning the EP, but rather why the
EP has not changed in the same direction, having opted for other directions.
Camara Jr. (1957) was the first to defend the hypothesis of drift or natural change when
he sought a structural internal reason to explain the Brazilian use of the accusative in the
expression “Eu vi ele” (I saw him). This author argues that the proclisis of the clitic “o,”
like in “eu o vi”, creates the phonetic word [ovi], in which the pronoun is treated as a
vowel. When it falls, the representation of the direct object goes with it, making it
necessary to choose another pronoun to fill the function. If we say “eu o vi” (I saw him),
the last two words would sound like [uvi], in which “u” will be treated like a vowel,
candidate to disappear, like in “imagina” (believe), which we say usually “magina”. The
problem is that in “magina”, the initial vowel does not have a grammatical role, whereas
in “uvi” the first vowel is the direct object to see verb, and makes a bad miss. To fix
things, it was started to use the pronoun “ele”, and with that, there is nowadays “eu vi
ele” (I saw him). The clitic was lost, but the “ele” accusative is a gain.
Camara Jr. (1963: 75) would return to the theme, excluding the possibility of an
indigenous-based creole, because the indigenous languages “were replaced in the
intercourse of the Indigenous with the whites by a single language – the so-called Tupi”
(limiting their contribution to BP to lexical loans). As for African languages, “black
slaves adapted to the Portuguese in the form of creole speaking. [...] It is clear, however,
that profound phonological and grammatical changes would not be made without
correspondence with the very structural tendencies of the Portuguese language” (Camara
Jr. 1963: 77). As it turns out, Camara Jr. studies the impact of indigenous and African
languages on BP and, although he admits the existence of an African creole, at no time
does he remove the hypothesis of natural change, or hypothesis of drift.
Another contributor to the drift hypothesis is Naro (1981, 1991), who maintains that there
are two paths to syntactic change: either it starts from an innovation arising in the less
salient contexts, in the sense of less perceptible, and it radiates to the most salient – and
it would be a natural change – or, on the contrary, it starts in more salient contexts,
reaching the less salient – the case of conscious change, or change by imitation.
In this hypothesis, salience, therefore, would govern the diffusion of a change as a fact of
the linguistic structure, excluding the influence of external factors. The loss of the
agreement morpheme in non-standard BP is a case of natural change, having arisen in
forms like “ele come” ~ “eles comem” (s/he eats ~ they eat), radiating to cases like “ele
é” ~ “eles são” (s/he is ~ they are), in a change not yet implemented. The recovery of
agreement in these cases of major salience is explained by decreolization, limited to the
school classes. Against the creolist hypothesis, Naro also adds that the pre-existence of
the general languages inhibited the development of creole, which has never been
sufficiently documented yet.
Based on syntactic evidence, Moraes de Castilho (2001) specifies that the 15th-century
variety of EP is the one that would have given BP the most contributions. Arguing that
the basis of BP cannot be the 16th century EP (which did not yet exist at the time of the
settlement of Brazil, which began in 1532), she relates several syntactic characteristics of
EP, commonly attributed to the emergence of a grammar of BP, which were widely
documented in the 19th century, such as the topic constructions, as in “O menino, ele
chegou” (The boy, he has just arrived), duplication of clitics that would result in changes
of the pronominals, as in “Eu não te falei para você?” (Did I not tell you?), duplicate
possessives, as in “Leve o seu livro dela” (Take her book from her), which explain the
use of “seu” as possessive of the 2nd person by specializing “dele”as possessive of the 3rd
person. The above and other syntactic facts demonstrate once again that the question is
not why BP stayed as it was, but why the EP took an unexpected turn, moving away from
the archaic Portuguese. This work gives new life to the many studies that document
phonetic and lexical archaisms or aspects of BP ancianity (Cohen et al., 1997), with the
difference that syntactic arguments are now triggered.
Assuming the hypothesis that the language that changed was BP, studies led by Fernando
Tarallo and Mary Kato from the 1980’s on showed that the crucial moment of this
departure was located in the 19th century. The program then launched recommended the
study of personal pronouns, whose alterations would have important consequences, such
as the loss of the subject's inversion, its more systematic filling, the non-completion of
the direct object, the change of the relativization strategies, etc., in a set of characteristics
not documented in the EP at the same time. From this program, there was a lot of evidence
about the distance between BP and EP (Roberts and Kato, 1993, Galves, Roberts and
Kato, 2019).
3.3 Neither creole, nor drift, maybe a pluricentric language

Both the drift and creolization hypotheses to explain the BP establish Portuguese as the
base language or protagonist of the process, erasing or putting in second place the
contributions of the native peoples and enslaved Africans, whose population contingent
was much higher than that of the European colonizers for most of those 500 years.
Traditionally, the contributions of these peoples are relegated to the background, limited
to the lexicon. This is how textbooks (and even grammars and academic articles) still tell
the story of BP. For example, concerning African heritage, Bantu words incorporated in
BP have known a greater dispersion by the lexical areas, on the other hand, words from
the Sudanese culture focus on 65.7% of the liturgical language of candombliss, such as
these words of the Iorubá incorporated into the BP (Castro, 1980). In a similar way, it is
assumed that the bulk of lexical contributions to BP come from Tupi-Guarani, which gave
about 10,000 words, mostly constants of toponyms and anthroponyms, to which common
nouns have been added, designating vegetables and animals (Rodrigues, 1993).
Are the contributions limited to this, or does the identification of only these contributions
reflect a language hierarchy bias? The concept of creole and irregular linguistic
transmission denotes a hierarchical view from the hegemonic point of view. Mufwene
(1996) questions why a concept of defection change is used for European languages in
contact with other base languages, in a process of the racialization of languages. In this
sense, all Latin-derived languages also result from a process of irregular transmission,
and this is not the case.
Lobato (2006) claims that the formation of BP was the result of contact with speakers of
other languages, but this does not invalidate the possibility that the structures resulting
from this contact had already existed before, in EP. She gives evidence from the
linearization of syntactic arguments, claiming that this property of BP was shared with
Tupi and the general language of São Paulo (besides other Brazilian indigenous
languages), but not with EP.
There are still few studies on African linguistic influences on BP because even African
languages are still too poorly documented and described to make this comparison
possible. For example, to identify similarities between the phonological structure of
Portuguese and the Bantu languages, it was necessary to first describe the Bantu
languages. It was what Castro (1980) did for highlighting that BP and Bantu have the
same number of vowels and the same syllabic structure, which would explain the non-
emergence of African creole in Brazil, in addition to certain characteristics of the
pronunciation of PB. Contrastive studies between BP and Portuguese in Africa nowadays
are uncovering facts that can help understand the processes that led to the constitution of
BP, as shown in Brandão (2018).
Also a pluricentric hypothesis can be considered to explain BP. While Portuguese is
assumed to be a pluricentric language (Baxter, 1992), a body of work considering
mobility can explain the spread of BP and lead to a pluricentric status at different times,
from before the arrival of Portuguese until the present movement.
Nascentes (1953) said that the phonemes /e/ and /o/ in the pre-stressed position draw a
line between two large dialectal areas in Brazil: the North, where these vowels sound
open, like [ε] and [ò], and the South, where they sound closed, like [e] and [o]. In addition
to dialectological studies, such as those of ALiB, sociolinguistic studies also offer
evidence to support the pluricentric hypothesis. The realization of /r/ and /s/ in the coda,
and of /t/ and /d/ followed by /i/ function as shibboleths in Brazil, characterized by centers
radiating the norm pattern, but not necessarily the opposition between north and south.
As new studies are carried out, especially in regions outside large urban centers and the
coast, the specificities of BP as a function of its different contacts are increasingly being
observed.
The BP’s pluricentric is already manifested in language policies, such as the National
Textbook Program (“Programa Nacional do Livro Didático”), which selects textbooks for
public basic education and which sets as a requirement for textbooks in the area that they
contain prestigious urban standards, plural, as opposed to a single standard. So, in this
direction, the answer to how many BP there are in Brazil is as many as there have been
language contacts.

45. Directions

The trajectory presented in this chapter highlights a transition from a multilingual

scenario to the monolingualism of dominance in Brazil, and now, again, a period of
recognition of linguistic diversity and openness to new varieties is beginning as a declared
language policy. The National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity, established by official
law in 2005, has already recognized general languages, such as Nheengatu, heritage
languages, such as Talian, and languages of border contact, such as Portunhol. In the same
law, varieties of BP and African languages are also included.
In Brazil, education plays a significant role in social transformations, as it is a form of
class mobility. In all societies, illiterate and educated people do not speak in the same
way. However, in Brazil, this difference is even more pronounced, leading to
differentiation proposals such as that of popular Portuguese BP and educated BP as a
result of a divided society (Lucchesi, 2015). Evidence from sociolinguistic approaches
has shown that there is no categorical opposition between popular and educated BPs in
speech, with a sharing of properties occurring in many cases, and in informal situations,
the distance between these varieties decreases.
The new millennium is characterized by a policy of expansion and a movement fo the
countryside in higher education in Brazil. For almost 500 years, public colleges and
universities were concentrated in the state capitals, especially in large cities along the
Atlantic coast. New universities and colleges were created in the countryside of Brazilian
states, especially in the northern and northeastern regions of the country. In addition, the
implementation of a unified admission process and the adoption of inclusive policies,
such as racial quotas for students coming from public schools, promoted the expansion
of access to higher education for students who previously would not have been able to
study.
These social changes have the potential to impact the language in two directions:
1) the creation of new centers of PB studies outside the large urban centers that
traditionally irradiate the linguistic norm;
2) the linguistic contacts promoted by student mobility as a result of a unified
selection process.
The first effects of these changes are felt in the demands for the inclusion of under-
documented linguistic varieties of Brazilian Portuguese in the constitution of its linguistic
norm, which suggests a pluricentric BP (Freitag, 2021, 2022).
New research agendas, especially in places where the sociolinguistic landscape has not
been fully unveiled yet, such as the North and Northeast regions of Brazil, are
contributing to the strengthening of BP as a pluricentric language, and also subsidizing
actions of BP as a foreign language for global citizen (Azevedo et al., 2021). This is the
time and place for BP.

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