Language, colonization and revolution: political discourse over Mozambican languages

Abstract

This article was written to address the important issue of languages in the historical revolutionary process in Mozambique. In order to accomplish that, based on theoretical and methodological approach of Discourse Analysis and on the reflections of the project History of linguistic ideas: ethics and politics of languages, we have established a comparison between colonial discourse, which, as presented in the paper, instituted language politics that produced ideological submission to the Portuguese language, and revolutionary discourse, which, in turn, established language politics aimed at building a new man in a new unified Mozambican society, and, for that purpose, without discrediting the indigenous languages, establi­shed Portuguese as the official language.