The journey of Brazilian Portuguese begins at the end of the 15th century with the Bula Caetera Treaty signed in 1493 and with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. According to these treaties, the Brazilian territory was divided between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Castile. By the second of these treaties, most of the territory, now called Brazil, was handed over to the Portuguese Crown, which meant that there was now more interest in this territory than in the previous period. Preparations began for the first naval expedition to that unknown land. In 1500, under the leadership of Pedro Álvares Cabral, Portuguese colonizers came to a territory where they encountered more than a thousand indigenous languages, which greatly complicated the colonization process. In this article I will highlight the sociolinguistic history of Brazilian Portuguese, which is the outcome of five centuries of (internal) development and (external) historical events which have also increased the number of Brazilian Portuguese speakers.
This article aims to describe the sociolinguistic situation of two Italian-speaking communities in Santa Catarina. It presents a sociolinguistic panorama of Nova Trento and Nova Veneza from the 19th century, emphasizing the most important aspects of the history of Italian immigrants in Brazil, as well as the main factors that affected the use of Italian language varieties, and residents’ views and attitudes regarding the languages spoken in this part of southern Brazil. From the beginning of Italian immigration to Brazil the immigrants experienced different historical circumstances that have led to the current state of their dialects, mainly the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. But after almost one hundred and fifty years the dialects are still spoken and they have become part of the Brazilian cultural heritage.
This article aims to describe the linguistic situation in Brazil through the centuries emphasizing the most important points of history, ethnic groups, spoken languages in every century and the language policies which were applied. The discovery of Brazil and its colonization is a unique cultural and language situation. This article makes a sociolinguistic panorama of Brazil from the period of multilingual territory inhabited by indigenous tribes, who spoke hundreds of native languages, to the period of political monolingual territory, but with multilingualism located in certain parts of Brazil.
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