Language policy in Portuguese colonies and successor states

*Note on language names: Most of the indigenous languages in this paper have many names. I have as a general rule used the first name given in Ethnologue, representing the name recognized by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

ABSTRACT

In studying language policy, it is not enough to look at central government management, but also at the influence of managers at levels ranging from the family to international organizations. Actual cases reveal that there are also non-linguistic forces such as demography, war, civil strife, and economic breakdowns which have major effects. This paper summarizes a study of the Portuguese empire and its aftermath. The empire enforced the hegemony of Portuguese as the civilizing force that would remedy deficits in conquered peoples. Because settlers were usually males, intermarriage with local women or slaves was common. However, colonial policy and acceptance by the leaders of independence movements as a unifying language, recognizing the benefits of elite closure, meant that postcolonial successor states kept Portuguese as the language of instruction and government, and did not use indigenous languages. Civil strife, warfare, corruption, and economic breakdown after independence prevented the improvement of education in many cases. Thus, while Portuguese provided access to an international language and served as the unifying symbol for Lusophone organizations, it was at the cost of the stigmatization of indigenous languages and left a social gap between the urban elite and the rural citizens limited to local languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideology
• immigration
• slavery
• education
• lusotropicalism

Acknowledgements

This paper acknowledges the contribution of Richard Baldauf Jr. and Robert Kaplan to the field of language policy, as my interest in this topic arose out of reading some polities papers in the journal that they founded, Current Issues in Language Planning. I am grateful to the comments and suggestions of the editors and the anonymous readers who pointed out problems in an earlier version, and also to suggestions for improvement from Robert Kaplan. I also acknowledge the enormous help of the scholars whose research I have depended on, and of Google Scholar in helping me find it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bernard Spolsky, born and educated in New Zealand, earned a doctorate from the Université de Montréal and taught in New Zealand, Australia, England, and the United States before his appointment at Bar-Ilan University in Israel from which he retired in 2000 as Professor Emeritus. He has written 11 monographs, edited 24 books, and published 245 articles and chapters in learned journal and books. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, an honorary D.Litt. from Victoria University, and is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

ORCID

Bernard Spolsky http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2990-5490

Notes

*Note on language names: Most of the indigenous languages in this paper have many names. I have as a general rule used the first name given in Ethnologue, representing the name recognized by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported in part by a publications grant from the University of South Africa.