Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is an award-winning writer and contributor to publications such as the digital newspaper Observador, and has developed various activities in the academic and cultural fields. Her vast literary output began with the novel Esse cabelo (2015), and her most recent work is entitled O livro da doença (2024).
Augusto Soares da Silva is Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences (FFCS) of UCP-Braga, and a scholar of Portuguese language variation in the CPLP countries, especially Brazil. Both are taking part in a session to commemorate World Portuguese Language Day today at 3pm in the Isidro Alves Auditorium at Católica Braga. We anticipate this intervention with these interviews conducted by Maria José Ferreira Lopes, coordinator of the Portuguese Studies Course at the FFCS.
Interview with Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
Your university career began with a degree in Portuguese Studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. What led you to this choice and how important is a course centred on the Portuguese language for young people today?
When I chose my degree, I was mainly interested in studying literature, rather than the Portuguese language. I was interested in reading more and reading a bit of everything. I think it was a very wise decision for an eighteen-year-old girl interested in becoming a writer and I still believe that literature is the best gateway to any language.
As well as the Portuguese language, your academic career has been marked by literature, as you completed a PhD in Literary Theory at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. How does this choice relate to your literary career?
Studying literary theory was a way of pursuing my interest in reading more and reading authors from all over the world, without linguistic restrictions. I was also interested in understanding how texts work, what they mean, how to write about them - I was interested in learning how to read. At the age of twenty-two, I had an enormous curiosity to learn and know more, which the postgraduate study programme I joined helped me to satisfy. I'm sure today that I would hardly have become a writer if it hadn't been for the more than ten years I spent at university. I became a writer with what I learnt and against what I learnt.
One of the fundamental themes of your already voluminous and award-winning literary production is African identity, particularly Angolan identity. What do you think is the role of the Portuguese language in this problem?
It seems a bit limiting to look at my work like that: I write about people and I'm not really interested in national identities. Language interests me because it is in language that my characters express themselves and through language that they articulate their sensibility and their inner selves.
Mia Couto has often spoken of ‘militancy for diversity’ when it comes to cultivating the Portuguese language. What do you think of this perspective and what is the role of CPLP writers in this context?
I'm not aware of Mia Couto's statement, but I do believe that there is room in the universe of the Portuguese language for all its forms, changes, pronunciations, accents and extravagances. I believe that the more diverse they are, the richer the literature written in the language we all speak - and the greater the size of the world we are capable of conceiving as a community through language.
Statistics point to an expansion in the use of the Portuguese language, but in institutions such as the United Nations our language is still secondary to others, such as Russian. What do you think can be done to raise the international profile of a language as global as Portuguese?
It's very likely that this is mainly a political issue and one that is difficult to valorise without other factors being taken into account. Certainly, the secondary status of the Portuguese language is not due to its richness in spoken and written form. Perhaps without new political balances in the theatre of nations, things cannot be otherwise.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of immigrants to Portugal from the CPLP, especially Brazil. How might these circumstances influence European Portuguese?
In the most beneficial way possible: by enriching the language we speak, making it more agile, flexible, fun and plastic.
Interview with Augusto Soares da Silva
Much of your work as a researcher has been dedicated to the study of variation and change in our language, in particular comparing European and Brazilian Portuguese. What fundamentally distinguishes these two national varieties of Portuguese?
There are many differences between European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in all areas of language. It's interesting to note that there are innovative and conservative evolutionary trends in both varieties, so neither tradition is a characteristic of EP nor innovation is a privilege of BP. For example, BP is more conservative than EP in phonetics and phonology and in the placement of unstressed personal pronouns (called clitics): there were important changes in EP, from the 18th century onwards, in the unstressed vowel system, in the sense of a marked closure, and in the passage of clitics to the enclitic position, after the verb. The two national varieties began to diverge from the 19th century onwards, at the same time as BP standardised its own linguistic features. There are significant differences in phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon and pragmatics. The studies I've been carrying out as part of the CONDIV project (Convergence and Divergence between National Varieties of Portuguese), funded by FCT, lethometrically confirm a clear divergence between EP and BP over the last 70 years in both lexicon and grammar.
The number of immigrants from the CPLP (Portuguese-speaking countries) has increased in Portugal, especially from Brazil. Braga is seen as a special case due to the very high percentage of Brazilians who have settled in the city. How are these circumstances influencing European Portuguese and what effects do you foresee in the medium and long term?
In fact, BP enjoys great exposure in Portugal, which contrasts with the minimal exposure of EP in Brazil. In an article I recently published (‘Portuguese, pluricentricity and Brazilian Portuguese: A case of a reverted asymmetry?’), I tried to show that the ‘inverted asymmetry’, i.e. the greater influence of BP over EP, is more cultural than linguistic. This asymmetry is evident in the impact of Brazilian culture in Portugal since the mid-twentieth century and reinforced today, evident in Brazilian audiovisual products (telenovelas and music), the success of football, food (pão de queijo, açaí, tapioca), the press and internet content (YouTube videos, streaming, digital influencers, digital games, memes). Another indicator is the huge increase in Brazilian immigrants to Portugal in recent years, which has led to alarmist attitudes towards PB, considering it to be a disorder in the linguistic development of Portuguese children. But this asymmetry is not reflected to the same degree in the language. It is obvious that there is an influence of BP on EP. Contrary to what many have predicted, the linguistic impact of the famous Brazilian telenovelas has not been great. And the current influence via the internet and in Portuguese schools naturally leaves lexical and grammatical marks, but they will be ephemeral and the impact will be negligible.
What is the current state of the Portuguese language in the PALOP? With reference to Mia Couto's expression ‘militancy for diversity’, how has the Portuguese spoken in the PALOP evolved and how can more normative linguistics frame these changes?
We should distinguish between two situations: countries where Portuguese is not a mother tongue (Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, with their Creoles) and countries where Portuguese has had a growing number of speakers as a mother tongue or second language (Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe). In these three countries, there are emerging national varieties, i.e. Angolan, Mozambican and São Toméan Portuguese. The massification of education, social mobility and the prestige of Portuguese as a language of social advancement have favoured the nativisation of these African varieties, with their own phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical features. In some cases, there is the subsequent stage of endonormative stabilisation. This is the case of Mozambican Portuguese, with the ongoing project of the Dictionary of Mozambican Portuguese. The characteristic features of African varieties are the result of contact processes with Bantu languages and changes in the EP itself motivated by the respective linguistic ecologies. Demographic and linguistic projections point to an exponential increase in the population and speakers of Portuguese throughout the second half of this century, especially in Angola and Mozambique.
In recent times, new terms have emerged to characterise Portuguese, such as Pluricentric Language, Global Language and International Language. What do these terms mean?
Portuguese is a pluricentric language in the sense that it has several standard, typically national norms: two well-established national varieties (EP and BP) and more or less nativised emerging national varieties (Mozambican, Angolan and São Toméan Portuguese). Even today, Portuguese is more bicentric than pluricentric, given the hegemony of the European and Brazilian centres. It is also an international language, in that it is the national or official language of eight countries, plus Equatorial Guinea and the Macau Administrative Region. Given its enormous transcontinental expansion, Portuguese is also a global language. But there isn't yet - and it's unlikely that there will be any time soon - a common supranational standard for international or global Portuguese.
At the moment, our language is spoken by more than 300 million people, but its international weight is still small. What should be done to strengthen the importance of the Portuguese language?
It is important and urgent to develop language policies that promote the pluricentric standardisation of Portuguese. To achieve this, it is necessary to: develop pluricentric normative instruments, mainly dictionaries and grammars; promote the informal standardisation of emerging varieties through television, newspapers and the internet, as TV Globo has done for BP; build a policy of multilateral management of the different national standards, within the framework of the CPLP and with the collaboration of the Camões Institute, the Guimarães Rosa Institute and other institutions; and develop educational practices and teaching materials for teaching Portuguese as a pluricentric language. This pluricentric standardisation could serve as the basis for a pan-Lusophone standard, especially useful for the internationalisation of Portuguese.
