NYTimes: At Long Last, a Neglected Language Is Put on a
Pedestal
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ETAN
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Oct 23, 2006 09:48 PDT
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New York Times
October 23, 2006
São Paulo Journal
At Long Last, a Neglected Language Is Put on a Pedestal
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO,Brazil More people speak Portuguese
as their native language than French, German,
Italian or Japanese. So it can rankle the 230
million Portuguese speakers that the rest of the
world often views their mother tongue as a minor
language and that their novelists, poets and songwriters tend to be overlooked.
An effort is being made here in the largest city
in the world’s largest Portuguese-speaking
country to remedy that situation. The Museum of
the Portuguese Language, with multimedia displays
and interactive technology, recently opened here,
dedicated to the proposition that Portuguese
speakers and their language can benefit from a
bit of self-affirmation and self-advertisement.
“We hope this museum is the first step to showing
ourselves, our culture and its importance to the
world,” said Antônio Carlos Sartini, the museum
director. “A strategy to promote the Portuguese
language has always been lacking, but from now
on, maybe things can take another path.”
The museum, which opened in March, has already
become the most widely visited in Brazil, drawing
schoolchildren and scholars as well as tourists
from Brazil and Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa.
In the interests of linguistic harmony and unity,
it sidesteps a basic issue: whether dominion over
the language ultimately rests with the country
where it was born or this rambunctious, overgrown
former colony where it is most widely spoken.
George Bernard Shaw once described the United
States and Great Britain as “two countries
divided by a common language.” Much the same
could be said about Brazil, with its 185 million
people, and Portugal, with barely 11 million.
The issue is not just the contrast between the
mellifluous, musical accent of Brazil
“Portuguese with sugar,” in the words of the
19th-century realist Eça de Queiroz and the
clipped, almost guttural sound in Portugal. There
are also marked differences in usage that have
traditionally led to misunderstandings and provided fodder for jokes.
In Portugal, for example, a word for a line (the
waiting kind) is to Brazilians a derogatory slang
term for a homosexual. A Portuguese word for a
man’s suit of clothes means a fact or piece of information in Brazil.
Some purists in Portugal object to the slangy,
colorfully casual version of the language that is
spoken here and increasingly spread abroad
through Brazilian telenovelas, or soap operas.
They regard such informality as unworthy of the
language of Camões, the 16th-century poet whose
seafaring epic “Os Lusíadas” is often compared to
the masterpieces of Homer and Dante.
“That’s certainly not my reading,” Maria Isabel
Pires de Lima, Portugal’s culture minister, said,
though, when she visited the museum in August
with José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, her
country’s prime minister. “Language is a living
instrument, always moving, evolving and changing,
so I don’t see this phenomenon as pejorative. On
the contrary, telenovelas are an important tool
in creating more awareness of the Portuguese language and culture.”
In 1996, Brazil and Portugal joined with five
African nations Angola, Cape Verde,
Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and
Príncipe to found the Community of
Portuguese-Language Countries. Portuguese was
recently designated an official language of the
Organization of African Unity as a result of the
community’s efforts. Leaders think that more can
be done and hope that Brazil can lead the way.
“One of our objectives is to disseminate
Portuguese so that it has greater visibility in
international organizations,” José Tadeu Soares,
deputy director general of the group, said in a
telephone interview from its headquarters in
Lisbon. “But aside from Brazil and Portugal, the
other countries have only been independent for 25
or 30 years and don’t have the resources to
project themselves on the world stage the way Brazil can.”
Though the group recently granted observer status
to China, where the language still has official
standing in Macao, Portuguese is fading there and
in places like Goa, Damão and Diu in India, three
other former colonial outposts. But when East
Timor obtained its independence from Indonesia in
2002 and joined the community, that inspired an
outpouring of sympathy and support from Portuguese-speaking countries.
“For the Timorese, Portuguese is a way of
asserting their identity vis-à-vis Indonesia,
and, for that matter, even Australia,” Luiz
Fernando Valente, director of the Department of
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown
University, said in a telephone interview from Providence, R.I.
But, he added, the aspiration of some
Portuguese-speakers to see their language gain
official status at the United Nations is probably
beyond reach. “Portuguese is a global language,
spoken on every continent,” he said, “but it is
not an international language, used in diplomacy
and business the way that French is, and I don’t
know if that problem is solvable.”
Mr. Sartini, the museum director, said the museum
planned to send roving exhibitions abroad, to
disseminate Portuguese language and culture.
Ideally, he said, such displays would visit not
only Portuguese-speaking countries but also
those, like the United States, with Portuguese-speaking minorities.
The largest and oldest United States enclave is
around Providence, R.I., and Fall River and New
Bedford, in southeastern Massachusetts. There are
others, in the Central Valley of California,
around Fresno, for example, as well as in southern Florida and Newark.
At a literary festival near here in August,
though, the Anglo-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali was
quoted in the local press as saying that only
three languages are assured of surviving to the
end of this century: English, Chinese and
Spanish. Even José Saramago, the Portuguese
novelist and Nobel laureate who lives mostly in
Spain, has fretted publicly over the possibility
of Portuguese being overwhelmed by English and Spanish.
Spanish-speakers have sometimes jokingly
dismissed Portuguese as simply “Spanish, badly
spoken.” But because of Brazil’s huge size and
dynamic economy, cities like Buenos Aires and
Santiago, in neighboring countries, are now awash
in fliers and billboards offering Portuguese language courses.
“For 850 years, our neighbors next door have been
saying that there is no future for Portuguese,”
said Mr. Soares, of the community, referring to
Spain. “But here we are, still. The dynamic for
the language may come from Brazil, but there is
no doubt in my mind that Portuguese as a language will remain viable.”
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