Língua nacional: identidades reivindicadas a partir de lugares institucionais

Abstract

In a previous article entitled Em busca de urna identidade lingüística brasileira (Barros, 2000 p. 157, 158), I tried to draw a line-of-thought by connecting some points of view from a literary and theoretical perspective about a possible and controversial identity of the Brazilian language. ln this essay, continuing the same reflection, I have observed another important moment in which, due to the new edition of the O dialeto caipira - gramática- vocabulário (1955), Amadeu Amaral, this question is brought back and these contradictions are exposed through the institutional nervures, including theoretical sources, specially French ones, which allowed, at that moment, some concepts of language and dialects, additionally to the papers published in the media by renowned intellectuals dealing with anthropological researches. ln a lengthy, paper-like preface of forty pages, more than twenty pages are dedicated to general questions not only working as a background for the analysis of the book, but mainly as a positioning on particularities found in Brazilian Portuguese and on how they have been formed either in actual use or in academic studies.