Go to theallusionist.org/brazilian-portuguese to listen to this episode and for links to related material.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, should have checked language's label before putting it through a hot wash.
We’ll be departing from the renaming series for a few episodes - got death and Eurovision coming up, but then we’ll be back with the renaming after that - but this one still fits with the Telling Other Stories theme. So did I break my own series or not?
Content note: this episode discusses the enslavement of African people.
On with the show.
CAETANO GALINDO: In the 19th century we had a lot of doubt about the name of the language, if we should call it Brasileiro. And there is even like a long period in which official documents in Brazil kind of avoided - they dodged the issue and they used only expressions like 'the national language' not to touch into the problem. people up to this day, they ask me, "Should we change the name of the language to Brasileiro?" And I again answer them, this is not really the most important problem we have right now. And it's probably too late for that.
My name is Caetano Galindo and I'm a university professor, I teach historical linguistics, and also a translator.
HZ: And welcome back to the show. It's been a while.
CAETANO GALINDO: Thank you very, very much for the invitation. I love being back here.
HZ: Caetano talked about translating the podcast The Memory Palace into Brazilian Portuguese on the episode called One To Another. And he has just released a new book about the history and present of Brazilian Portuguese.
CAETANO GALINDO: The book is called Latim em Pó, which means 'powdered Latin' and is like a play on powdered milk. Both things sound kind of alike in Portuguese. But most importantly, the title comes from a song, a song called 'Lingua' - lingua means both tongue and language in Portuguese. And it's a song by Caetano Veloso, which is one of the true giants of Brazilian music, and the guy who inspired the choice of my name. So it's kind of a nice way to pay him back for that.
The new book is a history of the Portuguese language, most specifically Brazilian Portuguese, that begins with the origins of language and goes all the way through everything that happens before Portugal, and then when the Portuguese go to the sea and when they come to Brazil and then everything that happens here.
HZ: Well, no biggie then, just tracing things from the beginning of human existence.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. Pretty much.
HZ: And then one of the biggest languages in the world. Not much for you to tackle.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of getting linguistic knowledge to a wider audience - which might be familiar to you as an obsession.
HZ: Seems like a weird thing to do with your life, but alright.
CAETANO GALINDO: When we look at the history from afar, it seems like, yeah, the Portuguese came here and now we speak Portuguese, but it was not really like that. First of all, they took it slowly with the idea of occupying this land and deciding how they would do that. What happened in Brazil was in a way new to the Portuguese, they did not have a huge experience with colonizing properly and exploiting agriculture, for instance. And it took them a long while to do this in Brazil. When they were only picking things here, like brazil wood and things like that, there was not really a need for a very intense presence in here and for a very intense, I don't know, ruling of the land. They only wanted to get things from here. And so what happened in the first centuries of this colonization thing is that the languages that took hold in Brazil were indigenous languages, two of them: one in the shores of what is today São Paulo, pretty much, and all the land dominated by the Paulista world, so to speak; and then in the north we had a different language. Those languages were popularized versions of indigenous languages, of local languages. They were called general languages - línguas gerais.
HZ: Who came up with the línguas gerais?
CAETANO GALINDO: They existed before the Portuguese arrived. We had probably more than 1200 different languages in Brazil, in what is today Brazil. But there was like a lucky strike for the Portuguese because there was a very recent process of migration inside Brazil where one same group had come to dominate. (Dominate? Is this a word?)
HZ: Yeah.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. Thank you. So yeah, one single group or a family of people, of languages and of cultures, had come to dominate the whole shores of Brazil and the northern region of Brazil. So there was this family of languages. And they had this lingua franca, this sort of common language that they could use with each other. And then when the Portuguese come and the Jesuits come, they learn these languages and they kind of weaponized them. They used them to convert those people and to get in touch with that reality. They realize that this is very powerful as a means of contact: instead of trying to teach Portuguese to thousands of natives, they go, "Yeah, half a dozen of us can learn that language and then we can talk to them and change them around and everything."
HZ: Eventually, though, Portuguese became mandatory. The colonisers had got their use out of the línguas gerais, and now the locals were forbidden to use them.
CAETANO GALINDO: And those languages came to be prohibited and persecuted and pretty much extinct from the middle of the 18th century when things changed, when the exploitation of the colony changed with the gold rush, and then the agricultural rush with coffee and sugar. Portugal realized that they had better take hold of the colony. There is a series of laws that is passed, to kind of unify the colony and the government and the religion and schools, and even the behaviour of the Indigenous people and the Brazilians. Like you have to wear clothes and you have to speak Portuguese.
There were penalties to people who spoke a língua geral in school, for instance. Even in the 20th century, I've listened to indigenous people my age that remember the fact that they should not speak their languages in a major city, for instance, because that was frowned upon, that would brand them as “not Brazilian”.
We have one country today, very big - but we came very close to having two countries. And for most of the time that the colony was run by Portugal, they ran it as two different colonies: one in the north, and one in the centre and south. And the process was different in the two regions: the north has a very different demographic reality, a very intense presence of the indigenous element for the very simple reason that the white men were not able to get to them because it's very hard to access those regions. Even today, they speak one of those línguas gerais, one of those general languages. It has not died there. It has lived through everything because it could find places to hide. For instance, this language, which is called Nheengatu, which means 'good language', is today the official language of a city in northern Brazil, and this city is the size of Bulgaria. And it's the third largest city in Brazil. So you get to have an idea of the kind of proportions we are talking about here.
HZ: How did they make all these people in this enormous - now one - country speak Portuguese? How do you go about instituting that? Not that I'm planning anything.
CAETANO GALINDO: Hahaha! You never know. You guys have a past.
HZ: Oh God. Yep.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. Because it's improbable. It shouldn’t have happened.
HZ: Because they didn't have learning apps then.
CAETANO GALINDO: No. And no schools. Brazil had like a very slow trajectory of getting people to learn to read. So this was not a school thing, this was not a religious thing - because the Catholic church was all for the línguas gerais, for the general languages. If there is one key element to why everyone began to speak Portuguese here, and why we speak a relatively uniform variety of Portuguese in this country, it is the enslaved African. Because those guys had no choice. They had to learn this one language. And they moved around quite a bit, as the economy changed, and we stopped growing sugar cane and began growing coffee, and the gold rush ended and et cetera, et cetera. Those guys moved around. Those guys probably were like the leading force to drive Portuguese inside the country, from the shores, from the beaches, to the deep Brazil. And they were probably the leading force to relatively make it uniform, make it more alike, because they moved around a bit. We received more enslaved Africans than any other place in the world.
HZ: An estimated 5,848,266 enslaved African people - or at least that is thought to be the number of enslaved African people that were still alive when they got to Brazil.
CAETANO GALINDO: We were one of the last places on earth to stop enslavement.
HZ: Brazil didn't outlaw slavery till 1888.
CAETANO GALINDO: So this is like terrible, and I almost say lovely, irony in the fact that this place probably owes one of its more characteristic traits to that population: not to the white Portuguese that brought the language, of course, but to the layer of the population that was forced to use that language and that had made it its own, and that had to change it in the process. I always tell students that we sometimes have a problem when we try to translate something that is African-American vernacular, because we don't have an African-American Portuguese; we don't have a set of characteristics that point to the Blackness of a speaker or of a culture. But the fact is that maybe we don't have that because that's all we have. The entire reality of Brazilian Portuguese is this African Portuguese. And so, again, you look deeper into things and you find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.
HZ: Had those enslaved people acquired Portuguese because they were in Portuguese-colonized African countries, or were they forced to learn it in Brazil?
CAETANO GALINDO: People don't really think about that, but it is very likely that a part of that population came here already with a certain knowledge of Portuguese. First of all, because they were kept in - how to say it - in warehouses, in Angola especially, sometimes during quite long periods of time because they were captured and then they were bought, and then they were put in these trade posts, and they had to wait till the ships came and the negotiations happened. And sometimes they spent quite a lot of time in there with Portuguese masters already, and with very different languages in contact. They were not speakers of one and the same language, so they had no common language and they had the Portuguese already present to them.
The trip to Brazil could take one or two months depending on where you came from. And again, you were stuck with people speaking very different languages, and you had those Portuguese masters and interpreters - most of the time they had interpreters present. So yeah, there was some pressure that could assure that some of those people already came here with rudiments of Portuguese.
But not all of them. One of the biggest distinction, even of prices put to those people when they came here, was if they could or could not speak Portuguese. There was this branding of them as 'Africas' - Africans who did not speak Portuguese - and 'Ladinos', who could speak Portuguese. 'Ladino' is a corruption of the word 'Latinos', Latin. So we take that very same word and two thousand years later we are branding African enslaved people with that word. And we did something very cruel and racialized to the word, because 'ladino' exists today in our vocabulary, and it means smart, but in a bad way. Like that person you should not trust because she is smart. So it is one of those things where the centuries of prejudice are still present in the language.
HZ: How much of the vocabulary that is in sort of broad use in Brazil now is derived from indigenous languages or different African languages rather than European Portuguese directly?
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. It's complicated. We do have long lists of Indigenous words, for instance, but they're pretty much all connected to names of trees and names of animals and place names. So they're kind of restricted in their use. And the same goes in a sort of way for the African languages. Most of the words are connected with food, and with the African-American religions like Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba, things that are connected in a way to Santeria and Vodou in the Caribbean. So we have huge lists of words like that, but they are connected to that restricted universe. The list of words that have really come into everyday use is way shorter than that. And this is one of the things that led people to believe that this influence was not that profound, because we only have this sprinkling of some words in our day-to-day language. What people didn't really see - or didn't want to see - is that perhaps some of the structural differences in our language have this source come from there.
HZ: Does Brazilian Portuguese vary a lot within Brazil because the country is so enormous in size and people?
CAETANO GALINDO: Yes and no. There is variation and if you are unlucky, you can get to a situation where you get two Brazilians that don't really understand themselves with a certain degree of alcohol consumption involved. But in general, there is a huge amount of comprehensibility wherever you go. There is diversity, there is variation; we love to talk about that, we love to have prejudices about that and to stigmatize people because of how they speak. Of course, there is this whole thing with ‘non-standard’ pronunciations and words and choices; people still sometimes lose their accent when they try to become more accepted in the big urban centres where the money is. People like to cling to different words and different habits. But of course, when they get to cling to those same 10 or 20 things, it points to the fact that the whole mass of the language has not changed.
But at the same time, we have to recognize that the uniformity is kind of amazing. You can travel 5,000 kilometers in Brazil and you will still be understood whenever you get out of your car. And this is unreal. You get this 5,000 kilometer line and put it inside Africa or inside, I don't know, Europe - you don't even find the 5,000 kilometers - and you find amazing quantities of diversity. I mean, there's more diversity in Portugal in a way than in Brazil.
HZ: How much does Brazilian Portuguese differ from European Portuguese?
CAETANO GALINDO: Hmm. Once more, it depends. On paper they are quite alike. There is a whole question with the spelling today. We have unified spelling that Brazilians have championed, and the Portuguese do not like, and they usually do not use. So, there is this question with the spelling, but this is of course superficial. If you take a page from a newspaper - see how old I am, a page from a newspaper - published in Lisbon or in Rio de Janeiro, you can give it to anyone and it would not be a problem. But spoken: things get to differ, especially because we have these different constructions. And there is a huge difference in pronunciation. And here, I have to say that the blame's on them, because very weird things happened in European Portuguese after they came here. And they today have a system of - especially an absence of - vowels in their pronunciation that is quite… it's not typical of romance languages, and that makes their pronunciations very hard for us to grasp. We speak a clearer version of the language, and it does not help the fact that they are very much exposed to our language in television and music and cinema and whatever, and we are not as well versed in their variety of the language. So when Portuguese movies are screened here, it's not unusual for them to have subtitles.
The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts? As if we are not up to scratch speaking 'right' Portuguese, and as if what happened to the language here was just a sprinkling of different words and influences of African languages and Indigenous languages, but that had not altered like the substance of the language. And more recent work has proven, and is proving over and over again, that this is not really the case: that what happened here was much more violent to the language, and that we are speakers, and we should be - that's pretty much my point - we should be proud speakers of a new version of Portuguese that was kind of chewed up and spat out - 'spat'?
HZ: Yes.
CAETANO GALINDO: Thank you - and spat out by all these enslaved Africans and Indigenous Brazilians, original Brazilians. And most of what we came to consider as mistakes are indeed characteristics of this process.
HZ: Why do you think people feel like it's a defect?
CAETANO GALINDO: There is a racial component to it, because it is a Black language. It is an African language. Indeed, people kind of knew that, and in the 19th century, they began referring to the popular Portuguese we speak here as 'Pretoguese', which is kind of a good pun, ‘preto’ means black - Pretoguese. And there is this racial component as there is the racial component with like everything in Brazilian society. And there is the fact that we have developed kind of morphological characteristics that can indeed look like a simplified version of a European language, a more I could say streamlined version of a European language. And people looked at it as if it was cheap, as if it was wrong, as if it was bad. Right now I think we are in a moment where we have to rethink some of those evaluations. That's part of what we call the ‘complexo de vira-lata’, we call it ‘mutt complex’, as we do not think of us as thoroughbreds. This is part of the thing that I think we have to rethink today, this idea that the Portuguese know how to speak it and we are just vilifying the language and putting it down with our ignorance.
HZ: Is it complicated by the fact that it is currently the dominant language in Brazil, and therefore other languages have been kind of stamped out a bit by it?
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. This is a pretty humongous problem because Brazil is like an anomaly. We are a huge country where we pretty much speak, everybody, like the same language, and pretty much everyone speaks just this one language. This is kind of true, and this is pretty amazing if you come from anywhere else in the world. But this has also created this myth of the absolute unity and the absolute presence of Portuguese in Brazil. And we are home to more than 200 languages here. Almost 200 native languages still survive. And we have all these languages that came with migrants during the 19th and the 20th century. And we have dialectal versions of European languages here, like the Talian, which is an Italian dialect that is an official languages in some cities in Brazil. And some German dialects are present here and have also been made official languages of cities. So this is another thing that is turning: people stopping with this idea that we have to idolize the absolute unity of Portuguese and the presence of Portuguese in Brazil, and remember that we have this immense wealth of different languages and different persons in this country.
We do have lots of Brazilians that do not speak Portuguese, and that maybe even resist the idea of learning Portuguese. We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis in northern Brazil with the Yanomami, and most of the Yanomami people are not speakers of Portuguese. And we are now seeing in television, like every day those local leaders speaking they have wanted to learn Portuguese as adults because they felt they had to defend themselves. And this is awful as an idea, and as an idea for this country that has dreamed of this utopia of all speakers of the same language.
HZ: Are Indigenous languages endangered there at the moment?
CAETANO GALINDO: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We probably have around 200 languages left today. We have very incomplete data about these languages, but we know that the vast majority of them have less than a thousand speakers. And most of them are, you know, the elderly And these languages are going to die. We know they're going to die. We have maybe half a dozen or a dozen languages with a wide distribution. But they are still very contained in those communities. There is not much being done still today for most of them. Some of them are in a different situation: we have people translating Wikipedia into Baniwa, into Tucano, into Nheengatu. But this is new. This is something that is beginning to happen with a new generation of Indigenous leaders that got very well educated and are very smart in using the non-Indigenous society's weapons, as they call it. And they use these weapons to the benefit of their community and their survival and their idea of language even. They always call themselves 'relatives', which I find lovely, even though they're not related, and they may come from different ends of the country.
Myself, I'm problematic, because as far as family folklore and knowledge goes, I pretty much have all sorts of Brazilian DNAs in me. So I am a relative: I am Charrúa as for what my family used to say, which is a group, a tribe that we thought went extinct in the 19th century, but then in the 20th century we found a group of them and they're even speaking the language. I have African enslaved blood - that's for sure, you just have to look at me - and I'm part of the relatives community and I'm also very proud of that.
HZ: It is so fascinating to have a language that is both oppressor and oppressed.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. And you know, the whole colonial thing is a whole new layer of complicated into everything. Brazil is not even the more complicated of the situations, I think.
HZ: Oh, which would you choose?
CAETANO GALINDO: I don't know. I don't know because we have this mixed blessing in the fact that Portuguese, when we came to be a nation, was not a foreign language; we had already made it our own. That is not the same situation as the Portuguese colonies in Africa and elsewhere. They sometimes have had to choose Portuguese as literally the lesser of many evils because they did not have a common language at all, and they had to turn to Portuguese as this only way to try and unify the country. That did not happen here for a fluke of history, for this amazing fact that the bizarrely cruel process of enslaving people and trying to erase their culture, their history, their language, has enabled them to be pollenisers of this new language. We took it and we made it into kind of a blessing. So yeah, we're in this way kind of a symbol of what could happen in a colonized society, but we are part of a good way that this could happen. I don't know, maybe I'm being just too optimistic here.
HZ: It's nice that you feel that, because it sounds from what you’ve said like generally the language does not have that glorious a reputation amongst its speakers.
CAETANO GALINDO: No. But Brazilians are very confused and confusing and confounding about this relationship with the Portuguese language because it defines us. We are the place that speaks Portuguese in the middle of a whole bunch of Spanish-speaking countries, and pretty much all of us speak it. And pretty much all of us speak only this one language. It's really something that defines us and really something that we cannot try to deny or erase or… I don't know. But at the same time, you have this certainty that this was an imposed reality, that this is not what we could have. And so, as the language has remained for a very long time the language of the elite and this elite had connections to Portugal, it remained closer to the ideas of language that were valid in Portugal for quite a long time.
But that is also changing, for one simple reason: we are huge. And we are comparatively rich and culturally relevant, and we are the people to whom people look when they think of Portuguese today. You said “one of the largest languages in the world”: yeah - thanks to us. You take Brazil out of the equation and it is probably, I don't know, the 50th most spoken language in the world. During the Covid pandemic, there was this ludicrous question where some parents in Portugal became concerned that their kids were going to turn Brazilian because they were watching so much television and so much online things that are always produced here, that they were using words and turns of phrase and sounds that their parents did not recognize. And so they were going like, “We're gonna lose our kids to the bad Brazilians!”
HZ: Yeah. I suppose it's the not knowing that is the big thing there, isn't it?
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah. And of course with English, I think it's the same situation. I remember like reading that Paul McCartney's dad was concerned with the “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” because he said, “No, this is too American. You're losing what's British in you.” It's the same thing.
Brazilian Portuguese has made some things that are really amazing. We have to try and realize that some of those things that we did to the language are just ours. And we really have to accept what we have, not as lesser, not as wrong, but as what constitutes us, what makes us who we are.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
locorestive, (Lamb) adj: staying in one place. [Humorously modelled on locomotive, from Latin restare, to stay still.]
Try using ‘locorestive’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The original music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the podcast Neutrino Watch.
You heard from Caetano Galindo, professor of historical linguistics, translator of many things including James Joyce’s work and the Memory Palace, and the author of the new book Latim em Pó, about the history of Brazilian Portuguese. It’s in Brazilian Portuguese, but if enough of us want it, maybe there can be an English translation? Caetano also features in a new documentary about the language: Our Country is the Place Where We Are Loved, so look out for that.
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