The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) has approved the research project ‘Convergence and Divergence between National Varieties of Portuguese’ (CONDIV) with a rating of Excellent, within the scope of the Call for Scientific Research and Technological Development Projects (IC&DT) in All Scientific Domains.

The project, coordinated by Professor Augusto Soares da Silva and to be carried out at the Centre for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies (CEFH), received funding of €250,000 (maximum amount allocated per project) over three years.

Of the 768 research projects approved for funding by the FCT in all scientific fields, corresponding to an approval rate of 30.2 per cent in relation to the total number of applications submitted, this project is the only one approved for funding in the area of Linguistics at a national level.

The CONDIV project aims to investigate the intricate dynamics of linguistic variation in Portuguese in its national varieties - especially European Portuguese (EP), Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Mozambican Portuguese (MP) and Angolan Portuguese (AP) -, the standardisation of African varieties and the growing pluricentrism of the Portuguese language.

At the centre of the study is a socio-cognitive and letyometric analysis of lexical, grammatical and attitudinal aspects, shedding light on divergence and convergence between PM and PA compared to PE and PB over the last seven decades.