Language Policy and Globalization 1: The Portuguese Language in The Twenty-First Century

1 Language Policy and Globalization
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The Portuguese Language in

the Twenty-First Century
Gilvan Müller de Oliveira
INTRODUCTION
The production of goods and merchandise has historically faced major and
minor phases in the opening up of markets. There have been economic cycles
aimed either at the protection of producers or at access to the products of
distant lands; there have also been cycles aimed at stimulating or restricting
competition. Important economic theories have arisen dealing with the rela-
tive openness of markets, such as neo-liberalism and its many variants, or
with protectionism in its different forms.
For example, before World War I, the open market, which was character-
ized by intense economic exchanges, transformed into intense protectionism
associated with the 1929 crisis. After World War II, the liberalization of the
economy took place only very slowly, and as long as communism lasted, it was
maintained within clear limits, given the fear of providing support for revolu-
tions, which could occur, it was thought, as a result of the shocks coming from
policies of economic deregulation and privatization, which were seen as the
basis for the opening up of markets. Then in the 1990s liberalization happened
abruptly when there was no ideological alternative for the affected populations.
By 2010 the critical phase of liberalization had already passed, and the con-
sensus on the advantages of having a more open economy had grown. The
process is now advancing in many directions: from the growth and consolidation
of regional economic blocs to the development of transport and communication
infrastructure, from cross-border migration to long-haul mass tourism, from
distance learning to the proliferation of programmes of academic exchange.
This chapter centres on three aspects of globalization processes in the
present geopolitical situation. All three aspects are related to the formu-
lation and implementation of language policies and, in particular, to the
applicable copyright law.
presence of the Portuguese language in the context of global multilingual-

ism. The three aspects of language policy vis-à-vis Portuguese are
• The internationalization of Portuguese;

• The internationalization of the management of Portuguese;
• The internationalization of Portuguese-speaking institutions through
the language.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/1/2016 4:39 AM via STOCKHOLM UNIV
AN: 928900 ; Moita-Lopes, Luiz Paulo.; Global Portuguese : Linguistic Ideologies in Late Modernity
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28 Gilvan Müller de Oliveira
THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF PORTUGUESE
Having been the first among languages in another period of globalization,

that of the Great Discoveries of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, Portu-
guese is the official language today in 10 countries;1 8 of them are members
of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), and the
other 2 are Equatorial Guinea, which made it an official language in 2011
alongside Spanish and French, and the Special Autonomous Region of
Macau, China, where it will share official status with Mandarin Chinese
until 2049.
The language officially extends over an area of 10.7 million square kilo-
metres. It is present in America, Africa, Europe and Asia and is spoken by
221 to 245 million people as a first or second language. The number is
growing at a moderate rate: there is low growth in Europe and Asia, mod-
erate growth in South America and significant growth in southern Africa.
Southern Africa is the region that is the main pole of language growth,
and according to present predictions, it will reach 135 million speakers by
2060 (64 million in Angola and 71 million in Mozambique; United Nations,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014).
In addition, there are between 7 and 9 million Portuguese speakers in
the various diasporas, particularly in the United States and Canada, the
European countries, Japan, South Africa, Paraguay and Venezuela. In
these countries interest and support for Portuguese as a heritage language
are increasing. This is a phenomenon that can foster important connections
between CPLP countries and those where the Portuguese-speaking dias-
pora thrives. Furthermore, remittances by emigrants represent a boost to
economic development that should not be underestimated. For example, in
the United States Brazilians transfer more than $5 billion annually (Mar-
tes, 2008). In 2011 users of Portuguese on the internet reached a total of
86,639 million. It is the fifth most-used language on the net. This rate is
an indication of the literacy level of the lusophone populations, which is
increasing with the growing rate of school attendance.
Portuguese is officially recognized by 26 international organizations.
Among these are 5 of the 17 regional economic blocs worldwide today,
which are valuable fields for the promotion of languages. They include
the EU, Mercosul, SADC, ECOWAS, ECCAS and soon ASEAN,2 a bloc
which East-Timor will join in 2017, extending the potential for diplomatic
and economic use of Portuguese in Asia. Among diplomatic organizations,
Portuguese is used in bodies such as the African Union, UNASUL (Union of
South American Nations), the International Postal Union etc.

Countries where Portuguese is an official language have approximately
29,000 kilometres of frontiers with other official languages, thus permit-
ting interesting geolinguistic alliances such as that between Portuguese
and Spanish speakers in South America, established by Mercosul. Portu-
guese is also gradually being recognized as a foreign language in countries
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Language Policy and Globalization 29
neighbouring those where Portuguese has official status, as in the cases of
Argentina and Namibia.
Within the CPLP, Portuguese cohabits with approximately 339 different

languages, which are bound up with local cultures and which are today
objects of a series of promotional programmes on the part of governments
(see Revista Platô, 2012). In this way, the states where Portuguese has offi-
cial status are learning to see as an opportunity the fact that 5% of the total
number of world languages are spoken in the CPLP countries.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations where
Portuguese had official status, Portugal and Brazil, were very isolated from
each other and turned inward to focus on their internal problems. Both
faced continual internal economic and political crises from the beginning of
the nineteenth century on, with brief periods of economic recovery. It was a
crisis of longue durée, in the sense defined by Braudel (1984), caused by the
collapse of slavery or semi-slavery, which brought about fundamental eco-
nomic change. For centuries, colonialism and slavery had been the mainstay
of “the world that the Portuguese created”, to use the title of the famous
book by Gilberto Freyre (1940). This profound crisis compelled the two
countries to gradually abandon mercantilist trading patterns that had been
operating since the crisis of 1383–1385 (Faoro, 2001), and it led them to
seek development through modern capitalism, an order which the ruling
classes, so well described by Faoro, hardly understood.
The second half of the twentieth century found both countries on the
same side in the bipolar world of the Cold War, trying to develop pref-
erential relations with the United States and Great Britain and to contain
supposed communist advances on the home front, thus stifling the social
demands which arose, specifically from the long-term structural crisis in the
two countries.
Containing both communism and movements of popular protest while
continuing to maintain old mercantilist structures, which produced poverty,
were the main aims of the 41 years of dictatorship under Salazar in Portugal
and, likewise, of the 8 years of the New State (Estado Novo) in Brazil (1937–
1945). The aims of the 21-year-long military regime in Brazil (1964–1985)
were similar, as noted by Faoro (2001), although in the Brazilian case it was
actually more a matter of ‘modernization without modernity’.
Brazil developed in the sphere of underdeveloped capitalism described by
‘dependentist’ theorists, who were centred around the UN’s Economic Com-
mission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). Portugal, on the
other hand, struggled to keep the last colonial empire in the world, waging
an African war on three fronts between 1961 and 1974. In the Colonial War,
almost 10,000 Portuguese died, as well as tens of thousands of Angolans,
Guineans and Mozambicans, including both civilians and combatants in the
independence movements.
This was clearly a negative period for the Portuguese language, given
that its speakers found themselves in countries without, or deficient in,
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democracy, civil rights and freedom of expression. Their writers were per-
secuted and censured; a large number of intellectuals and scientists lived in
exile; and their school systems lacked resources and were incomplete and
elitist, excluding a large part of the population from education, let alone
higher education. In these circumstances, what sort of appeal could Portu-
guese have in the order of the great languages of the world?
The period following the fall of authoritarian rule in Portugal in 1974 led
to the decolonization of African countries and to the creation of Países Afri-
canos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (PALOP, the bloc of African countries
which use Portuguese as an official language). This period also coincides
with the re-democratization process in Brazil, with its 10 years of ‘slow,
gradual and sure’ transition to democracy (1975–1988). However, from
then on, Brazil saw the outbreak of the economic crisis (1980–1994) which
followed the so-called Brazilian economic miracle (1969–1975). This con-
tinued to be a time of political and economic crisis in Portugal and in Brazil,
and it was also a time of national reorganization, which opened the doors to
the next historical moment, starting in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
From 1975 onwards, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique
and São Tomé e Príncipe obtained their independence and joined the com-
munity of nations. They emerged from the armed struggle for independence
as one-party states—under the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO3—and at
the same time aligned themselves with the communist side of the Iron Cur-
tain. For 15 years (1975–1990), the Portuguese-language world remained
divided into the Soviet and Western blocs, which made the development
of its internal relations difficult. Furthermore, at that time Portuguese had
little international appeal and no chance to compete with other great inter-
national languages.
While the plan to unite Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau into a single
country miscarried, civil wars continued in Angola and in Mozambique,
and East-Timor through FRETILIN fought against Indonesian occupation,
Portugal joined the European Union (1986). This was widely considered to
be a historical step away from Atlantismo—an Atlantic outlook—and a de-
prioritization of its relations with the other Portuguese-language countries.
At the same moment, Brazil and its neighbours founded the Common
Market of the South (Mercosul) in 1992, prioritizing South American
integration. Immediately after this, the Dentists’ Conflict4 broke out (1992–
1996); this, along with diplomatic incidents involving tourists, marked a
low point in Portuguese-Brazilian relations and rekindled old historical
grudges between the populations of the two countries.
What emerged provisionally at the end of the Cold War was a unipo-
lar world with two clear winners: the United States of America and the
English language. A concern that English might become the only language
and threaten the existence of other languages, especially those spoken by
small populations, hence labelled as ‘endangered languages’, dates back to
this time. The 1990s would be the years of victorious neo-liberalism, the
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Washington Consensus, and the rapid spread of the language associated
with triumphant global capitalism. About 12 years after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, however, this model was beginning to fracture in many countries into
a mosaic of economic crisis, political instability, de-industrialization and,
finally, ungovernability. This was, for example, the case of Argentina in 2001.
Then, in about 2002, another historical phase began, destined to rearrange
international power relationships and open perspectives for Portuguese in
the international arena.
This new phase valued positively the movement which had begun with
the First Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Portuguese
Speaking Countries, convened by the Brazilian government in São Luis do
Maranhão in November 1989. This led to the creation of the Portuguese Lan-
guage International Institute (IILP) and then, some years later, in 1996, to the
CPLP. This was the first conference ever to place Brazil, the PALOP nations
and Portugal at the same table. On that occasion the IILP was conceived and
created formally to oversee the Portuguese language on a multilateral basis.
That first conference kindled the idea of a formal geolinguistic community
to foster political-diplomatic agreements and economic cooperation between
Portuguese-speaking countries, and the process got under way with the cre-
ation of the CPLP. After the creation of the CPLP, the IILP was incorporated
into the organization as a body with scientific and financial autonomy.
RECENT HISTORY OF THE GEOPOLITICS OF

THE COUNTRIES WHERE PORTUGUESE HAS
OFFICIAL STATUS: THREE PHASES
In the period from 1930 to 2012, the Portuguese language went through
three historical phases:
1. Dictatorship, conservative modernization, Colonial War and decolo-

nization in the ambit of the Cold War (1930–1975);
2. The long transition process to democratic normalization and the
displacing of the crassest aspects of the inequality arising from an
economic model adopted since former centuries; and
3. Assimilation as ‘equals’ into a multipolar world, partial change of
centres of power, expansion and globalization of international rela-
tions with improved positioning of countries in which Portuguese is
an official language, major internal democratization and better access
to public services with the enlargement of the middle classes.
This last phase witnessed the emergence of Brazil as a global power, as a

member of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), a group
of countries of great importance in territory and population and responsible
today for an important part of world economic growth.
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It was a time which also saw continued economic growth and diplomatic
successes in Angola and Mozambique, based principally on partnership with
China (Saraiva, 2012), as well as on the relative success of economic policies

in Cape Verde and East-Timor, the latter being a country without foreign
debt and with reserves of over $8 billion. At the same time, oil was discov-
ered in Sâo Tomé e Príncipe, with reserves estimated at 10 billion barrels.
Between 1996 and 2005, as reported in the World Bank’s Indicators of
Development in Africa 2007, Mozambique was the African country with
the most diversified and sustainable growth, followed closely by São Tomé
e Príncipe and Cape Verde. Mozambique, with an average growth of 8.3%,
was ahead of Rwanda (7.6%), the first in the list of “diversified economies”
(Sá Gonzalo, 2009: 78).
Portugal also grew economically from 2004 to 2010; however, since
2010, it has been caught up in the European crisis, which is forecast to last
a few more years. Guinea-Bissau remains in crisis since another military
coup occurred in 2012, and for the moment it is the object of a number of
international development programmes.
The post-2004 period has been a promising time for the growth of
Portuguese, as much internally as in the outside world. Education of the
population has expanded, as has the entry of countries into the international
community, together with the growth of the middle classes, demanding more
sophisticated products and exhibiting more diverse habits of cultural con-
sumption, such as more trips abroad and greater access to the internet. These
factors have fostered a greater interest in countries where Portuguese is used,
and consequently a greater inclination to learn it as a foreign language.
THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED SOCIETY, MULTILINGUALISM

AND THE EFFECTS ON THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE
Also during the period under discussion, the consolidation of what is known
as the knowledge-based society took place. Contemporary society is char-
acterized by forms of late capitalist production that have advanced the
computerization of growth and the production of information and com-
munication technology products—all of them being language intensive and
highly dependent on language for their operation. In this phase of capi-
talism, language itself has become a means of production (Marazzi, 2009;
Oliveira, 2010), and languages can now be analysed according to their eco-
nomic value.
According to Marazzi (2009), the replacement of Ford-style mass-

production capitalism by a more flexible just-in-time version has as its main
feature the production of small quantities of different versions of the same
product, which is rapidly made available in many different markets, how-
ever small the differences, given the increasing tendency towards oversupply
in mainstream markets.
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Applied to the field of the economics of language, this implies that new
language markets should be counted in production, given the finite nature
and oversupply of production in one single language. This is what the high-
tech companies like Google, or bodies such as Wikipedia, do: they operate in
many languages, deriving profits from the sum of all these language markets.
In order to be able to reach these markets, they need to set up multimedia
instruments in which all languages can operate at the same time. Multilin-
gualism is therefore an absolute priority in the digital world.
The use of the Portuguese language is growing most rapidly at this histor-
ical moment, alongside the overall growth in multilingualism. In particular,
it is now counted among the so-called important languages of the world, in
terms of features of the present stage of productive forces, with important
implications for changes in the pattern of global governance. For this reason,
concerns with measuring the economic value of a language have developed.
According to this method, measurement of the economic value of a lan-
guage within a country involves determining the coefficient of participation
in the language in the different branches of economic activity into which the
National Audit is divided, according to its contribution to the gross domes-
tic product. It is feasible to calculate a language coefficient in each branch
of activity and then quantify the importance of the language by branch.
These investigations obviously show that the economic value of a language
is greatest in the service sector, less so in manufacturing and still less in
agriculture. A sector like education, for example, is 100% dependent on
language, so here, among other sectors, it has maximum value. The eco-
nomic value of a language is then the value calculated in each of the national
economies in which it functions, added to international economic relations
that it facilitates.
Since Calvet (2002) we have become familiar with the notion of a lan-
guage market, arranged in a hierarchy and governed by factors that influence
the behaviour of the speakers. Calvet’s Orbital Theory of Languages sees the
language market as the inevitable expression of economic and political rela-
tions and as a language management space in which power struggles occur
between producers, owners and holders of language materials, with interests
in the distribution of their own language resources, to the detriment of the
products of their competitors.
In the case of the recent geopolitics of the Portuguese language, the two
trends described, separately and independently, have influenced its growth
as an international language. On the one hand, there have been the processes
whereby the countries in which Portuguese is an official language got their
respective houses in order, as well as changes in the international presence of

Portuguese; on the other hand, there has been the beginning of a period in
which high value has been assigned to multilingualism in ways that coincide
with the needs of the new capitalism. This novel situation, a favourable one,
presents us with huge challenges as we work out the policy for Portuguese
in the twenty-first century.
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THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE
MANAGEMENT OF THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE
Languages, at least the great national languages of the world, are subject
to management strategies which operate in the sphere of so-called language
policies. Most languages lack pilots; most of them are like leaves in the wind.
But major standardized languages have at least some control over their own
evolution, and those that are supported by a government have ways of steer-
ing their relations among the other languages with which they are linked
by communication, competition, cooperation and conflict. What should the
geopolitical survival strategy of such a language be when it is confronted
with a more powerful competitor (Laponce, 2001: 58)?
Observation of methods of management of the important languages—such
as they occur in negotiations between power centres that act on them—is in
itself a rewarding exercise, given the different models that have evolved his-
torically. Let us make a brief comparison between English, French, Spanish
and Portuguese language worlds in order to show differences on the basis
of a quite limited number of criteria: (a) centralization or otherwise of the
standard, (b) the leading role or otherwise of the former colonial power,
(c) the relationship between the state and the market in the promotion of
the language, and (d) expansion or retraction in certain linguistic markets.
Anglophone Worlds
• A decentralized standard supported by use, decentralized measures to
spread the language, with specialization between the different coun-
tries and no leading role by the ex-colonial power;
• States which ensure strong market forces, capable of attracting condi-
tions for the dominance of the language;
• Maintenance of the role and functions of the language as pivotal to
the global system, gaining importance in the supercentral, central and
peripheral peak functions of languages, as, for example, becoming the
language of science in countries like Holland or the Scandinavian coun-
tries; occasional losses of niche markets in less central areas as a result
of the promotion or officialization of minor languages.
Francophone Worlds
• A centralized standard and leading role for the ex-colonial power; a
strong state and medium-strong free market, with state intervention

that finances the language’s presence with important resources from
the public budget; growing costs and more limited resources to fund
language presence;
• Constant loss of presence in central niches to English, loss of functions
and presence in places with other languages growing in importance
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(Arabic, Wolof, Spanish), gain in peak situations associated with the
increase in literacy in francophone African countries, the continent in
which French is growing the fastest in the world.
Hispanophone Worlds
• Centralized standard, leading role of the ex-colonial power, strong
state intervention by one country (Spain), weak intervention in the
group of countries speaking the language; in other words, only 1 of the
21 officially Spanish-speaking countries concentrates in practical terms
its actions vis-à-vis the language, not allowing the language to benefit
from the resources of the group and the synergies this creates. How-
ever, this is a situation in which a crisis in this one country could wipe
out global action for the language. Strong market forces and market
orientation, benefiting from EU resources for the promotion of Spanish
and associating the other countries in a captive market of consumers
controlled in many sectors by the ex-colonial power.
• Gain in the face of the hypercentral language and the other competitors
operating at the same level.
Lusophone Countries
• Dual, decentralized standard, weak state intervention, with lead-
ing role by the ex-colonial power cut off, operative only in a part of
the language market (PALOP and East-Timor) but not in Brazil; exter-
nal language actions taken separately by Portugal and Brazil, without
the participation of the other countries; weak market in all countries
but growing in strength.
• Constant gains in presence in the secondary niche markets (periph-
eral markets), advances in limited markets over the range of other lan-
guages of the same level, for example, over the market of French as a
foreign language; loss of influence in some countries of the CPLP, as
has happened in Cape Verde with the advance of Cape Verdean Creole,
but consistent gains in proficiency in local populations, as in Angola
and Mozambique.
The political and linguistic history of Portuguese in the twentieth century

is an offshoot of the heritage of separation between Brazil and Portugal and
also of the late transformation of this empire into modern nation-states,
which, however, continued to be dependent on Portugal in matters to do

with the standard language. In time, political independence led Brazil to
declare a semi-independence of language: Portuguese was indeed established
as the official language and that of so-called national identity, but Brazil
aspired to build its own standard, proclaimed ever since the time of the
dispute between the Romantic and the Parnassian literary movements at
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the end of the nineteenth century. Through the 1922 Modernists, it became,
effectively, a matter of state in the parliamentary guidelines in connection
with the name of the language when, in 1946, the National Congress voted
on whether the language should keep the name Portuguese or should hence-
forth be called Brazilian (Morello, 2001).
In this process, in disputes between language nationalists on the one hand
and advocates of language unity on the other, the current sociolinguistic
scene of Brazilian Portuguese emerged. This can be described as a state of
diglossia involving an endogenous spoken standard, which evolved in the
historical process of the construction of Brazil, and an exogenous written
standard, created by means of a compromise with Portugal in the sphere of
writing, with imported grammatical traces that entered European Portu-
guese, but not Brazilian Portuguese, in the eighteenth century.
This distance, both grammatical and symbolic, between the endogenous
spoken norm and the exogenous written norm has made many Brazilian
intellectuals uncomfortable. They argue over how the role of the exogenous
written standard has made schooling difficult and hence created barriers
for the inclusion of the lower social classes in the realm of citizenship. For
many, the separatist solution is seen as the condition for the correction of
historical processes, bringing with it the chance to reform the standard
and bring it in line with the Portuguese spoken by the people. Underlying
this idea is that getting out of external commitments and ties with other
countries in which Portuguese is an official language, especially Portugal,
would lead to a reform of the standard and its approximation to majority
public usage.
Post-independence political relations between Brazil and Portugal, and
especially those that developed since the Proclamation of the Brazilian
Republic (1889), have produced a process of divergent standardization that
has led to the language having two academies, two orthographies (since
1911), two orthographic vocabularies, two dictionaries, two grammati-
cal terminologies (Brazil’s was created in 1957, Portugal’s in 1961), two
approaches to proficiency certification (the Brazilian CELPE-Bras and the
Portuguese CAPLE System), and two agencies for spreading Portuguese in
the world, the Camões Institute for Portugal and, for Brazil, the Division for
the Promotion of the Portuguese Language (DPLP) of the Cultural Sector of
Itamaraty (a section of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Furthermore, the two standards have developed different technical and
scientific terminologies, complicating the inter-operability of professional
practice. Finally, with the digital era, both standards are present on the
internet, resulting in two search engines for Google, two spelling correc-
tors and two voice synthesizers. Moreover, new digital learning tools, which
are appearing rapidly, appear to already be split into two. This only serves
to limit speakers of the language to the standard national variety, or to an
offshoot of one of the two principal ones, and consequently limits the instru-
mental importance of Portuguese as a world language.
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A different position, and one of great importance, pioneering another
approach, is that of Wikipedia, which has speakers sharing language as a
common good and contributing together. The major digital encyclopaedia

of the world has not created two separate instruments and monitors the
encyclopaedia to prevent users from one country from trying to replace on
any scale the norm of the other country with their own. It has instead set
down a single rule, according to which entries that express aspects unique
to national cultures should be written in the variety of that country. So the
entry fado should be written in the European standard of Portuguese, while
that for bossa nova should appear according to the Brazilian one.
Examples like this of Wikipedia, in contrast to the tradition established
in the last century, are the expression of an expanded, inclusive use of a
language which can lead to a convergent standardization, which, to the
benefit of the speakers, makes maximum use of the language as a means
of expression; permits better distribution in the language market, with obvi-
ous political windfalls; and includes countries which, for the moment, do
not take part in the management of their own official languages, that is, the
PALOP countries and East-Timor.
INDICATORS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF

A CONVERGENT STANDARDIZATION
The principal hypothesis of this section is that the maintenance of a divergent

standardization, such as the one that produced two historically standard
artefacts—one known as European Portuguese, adopted in Portugal and in
new countries that emerged from the process of decolonization after 1975,
and one known as Brazilian Portuguese, adopted in Brazil—is highly dys-
functional, especially since languages are becoming more and more central
to internationalized economic processes and since competition among the
major languages is increasing.
There is now growing pressure for the reversal of twentieth-century
standardization and growing arguments in favour of supporting a conver-
gent standardization process instead. These arguments are emerging from
changes in several areas:
1. The presence of the language on the internet and in digital lan-

guage products. The rigid existence of two standards increases
the investment costs for the development of tools needed for the
so-called language industry and divides up the profits, creating a

less integrated language market.
2. The growing formation of diasporas within the CPLP and the
growing importance of university exchanges for those who will
become the leading elites of the future. The present moment is one
of intense migration, with a search for contacts and partnerships.
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3. The interchange of oral and written cultural products, which
allows the citizens of Angola or Cape Verde, for example, to have
access, on open TV, to standard European Portuguese through

RTP Africa (a Portuguese TV channel), to Brazilian Portuguese
through Record TV (a Brazilian TV channel) and to their own oral
reference variety (through their national channels), beyond the
almost infinite cultural consumption made possible by access to
the internet in Portuguese. In this connection, Brazil is for various
reasons the most isolated country within the bloc, as it limits the
circulation of cultural products in the so-called standard language5
of other CPLP countries in its own media. The growth of contacts,
even in cases like this, creates better understanding, familiarity and
transit among varieties and norms for the use of Portuguese.
Given these pressures, among others, I suggest that the Acordo Ortográ-
fico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990 (AO90; the Spelling Agreement of the
Portuguese Language of 1990) signalled the first possibility of a convergent
standardization. This agreement was signed by all the countries which have
Portuguese as an official language and was ratified by all of them, except
for Angola and Mozambique. It has been in use in Brazil since 2009 and in
Portugal since 2011. It has also been in the first stages of implementation in
Cape Verde since 2012.
The AO90 is much more than a simple spelling reform. It proposes a pro-
found change of perspective in the management of the language. It does this
by overriding a purely national perspective of the sort to which the circles
of cultural life in Portugal and Brazil are accustomed and by opening up a
new vision which can lead to the joint development of methods or action
plans for language standardization, optimizing investment and a sharing of
benefits. The AO90 specifies a standard (in this case orthographic) negoti-
ated between all the countries in which Portuguese is an official language,
creating a shared responsibility for a common language. The way to follow
for other necessary developments, such as that of technical terminologies,
becomes clear.
Underlying AO90 is a vision which corresponds to the idea of the IILP,
and the necessary foundations: the idea of shared, multilateral language
management, respecting national differences, to be set up in the twenty-first
century. As Ferreira et al. (2012: 1) put it:
The orthography of Portuguese was changed several times over the

course of the past century [. . .]. These orthographic reforms are usually
implemented by means of a Vocabulary, in the sense of an inventory of
words. In the joint elaboration of the Common Orthographic Vocabu-
lary of the Portuguese Language (VOC), a tool envisaged in the text of
the AO90, a new model for the completion of a convergent standard
[. . .] is taking shape.
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In the context of an orthographic reform at the implementation stage
which finally manages to set down common rules for writing, there
will be, for the first time, a VOC, a resource which contains informa-
tion about orthography and the formal properties of words, a resource
which is common to all the countries of the CPLP.
The work is being undertaken under the coordination of the Por-
tuguese Language International Institute (IILP) [. . .] with the partici-
pation of teams from various countries of the CPLP. VOC will be a
large-scale, electronic data-base of lexical items, available in the pub-
lic domain, adopted as a tool in the implementation of orthographic
reform as is presently under way, and with many uses as a base for
shared linguistic resources, among which scientific and technical ter-
minologies.
In itself, the VOC constitutes a change of paradigm, passing from
an old, idiosyncratic format, of closed sources, in a supporting role, as
an official resource, to an authenticated resource, open and free, acces-
sible on the internet and reusable.
In keeping with the cooperative lines of VOC, and as an expression of a

convergent standardization for Portuguese, IILP has organized four interna-
tional colloquia on fields considered strategically important for the Plano de
Ação de Brasília (Brasília Action Plan—PAB) for the International Promo-
tion of Portuguese (CPLP, PAB, 2010):
1. The Maputo Colloquium on Linguistic Diversity in CPLP Coun-

tries (September 2011) in Mozambique, which brought about the
meeting of managers of more than 300 languages spoken in the
community area;
2. The Praia Colloquium on Portuguese in the Diasporas (November
2011), with representatives of 11 countries, which stressed poli-
cies under way for the preservation of Portuguese in the younger
generations in the various national areas where the language has
a heritage;
3. The Guaramiranga Colloquium on Portuguese on the Internet
and in the Digital World (April 2012), which dealt with current
challenges to the language in the sphere of information and com-
munication technologies;
4. The Luanda Colloquium on Portuguese in International Organi-
zations (July 2012), which focused on the possibility of Portuguese
becoming an official UN language, as well as its position in

regional economic blocs and in other types of organizations.
The colloquia prepared strategic themes for the II International Confer-

ence on the Future of Portuguese in the World Order (Lisbon, October
2013) and deepened the multilateral debate regarding international,
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cooperative management of the language, taking its multicentred nature
into account.
These conferences, organized under the aegis of the CPLP and with results
approved by their heads of state and government, have assigned concrete
action plans to the IILP, helping to focus its activity and allow it, through
technical cooperation conventions, to set up working groups to carry out
strategic projects under cooperative international supervision.
The inevitable conclusion from these considerations is that the constitu-
tion of a common language, ever more useful to its speakers and expanding
in its scope and uses, cannot be achieved through the imposition of a single,
central form of the language but through the creation of common manage-
ment practices, deciding by consensus the area of necessary variation so
that each of the countries feels represented and can invest in its common
construction, to its own benefit and that of its citizens.
Still embryonic at this moment, the movement towards a common
Portuguese language, conforming to the development of consensual and par-
ticipatory instruments, will require the overriding of purely national forms
of management, and the opening up of perspectives, for the internationaliza-
tion of the language in the wake of new international positionings for the
CPLP countries.
PORTUGUESE AS A TOOL FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION OF

CPLP INSTITUTIONS
The last part of this text deals briefly with Portuguese as a vehicle for the glo-
balization of CPLP’s institutions, with particular attention to the Brazilian
case, where the globalization debate has produced quite concrete political
linguistic demands. This section therefore centres on the following question:
what language policies are necessary for globalization?
In the first place, pressure for the internationalization of institutions
means, in the Brazilian case, a change of direction in the policy of past
decades. Previous policy has moved, above all, towards the formation of an
integrated internal market, protected from international competition with
fiscal, exchange-rate and investment policies which could be considered to
be contemporary extensions of the old import substitution model, character-
istic of countries with weak competitive capacity, which saw market controls
as a way to industrialize and diversify production. Thus, in the policy for
post-graduate study, worked out in Brazil from the 1960s onwards, when
a field of study already offered master’s degrees and doctorates in Brazil-

ian universities, the opportunities for grants to study abroad at these levels
abroad were cut, as this level of education had already been nationalized.
If we consider that policy applied to the linguistic diversity of Brazil, we
find processes such as the Campaign for the Nationalization of Education
(1937–1945), the purpose of which was to prevent Brazilian citizens from
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living their lives in languages other than Portuguese or indeed from being
bilingual, imposing a situation of Portuguese monolingualism. The policy
of the Brazilian state in this area destroyed the linguistic capital that gave
Brazil connectivity. Had it been made use of, it could have found a place in
the institutions of the country today, as another threshold for cultural and
economic exchanges and interchanges, along with the linguistic resources
already present in the country, especially with respect to German, Japanese,
Italian, Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian and Arabic.
This policy of enclosure in relation to other languages also occurred
vis-à-vis other standards or varieties of Portuguese, as discussed in the sec-
ond section of this chapter, and in relation to other countries, like Portugal
(which behaved likewise towards Brazilian products). This made the dis-
tribution of cultural goods difficult, especially books, and as I have shown
above, it led to the weakening of Portuguese as an international language
and to the reduction of its capacity to organize the transnational space that
has been called lusophony.
Brazil constitutes an area that is particularly closed towards other
standards/varieties of Portuguese. To give an example, whereas citizens of
Angola, Cape Verde or Mozambique have access to an open network of tele-
vision channels from Brazil (TV Record) and Portugal (RTP Africa), as well
as their own national channels, a Brazilian citizen can receive channels from
other countries only by cable, never by public transmission, and rarely via
the channels of other countries in which Portuguese is an official language;
the great mass of the population are totally confined within a national tele-
vised media space in Brazilian Portuguese.
A strategy of globalization is today finding expression in Brazil in new
language policies that result from the recognition of low educational success
of the country in the technological sector, and of the world dominance of
English, a pivotal language for scientific and technological progress. One of
these programs of the Brazilian Education Ministry (MEC), Inglês sem Fron-
teira (English without Borders) (Brasil, 2014), responds to the need to have
young people who speak English, so as to be able to send them abroad in
the Programa Ciências sem Fronteira (Science without Borders Programme)
(Brasil, n.d.). The goal of the latter programme is to have up to 100,000
undergraduates studying in top universities abroad, especially in the United
States and England, in order to develop research skills in the most important
centres in the world.
Another policy relates to the increasing circulation of Spanish. This is
pivotal for continental communication in Mercosul and Unasul. It is pro-
vided for and instituted in a number of legal arrangements, like Law 11.161
(5 August 2005), which mandates the provision of Spanish in secondary
schools throughout Brazil, with the intention of ensuring Brazil’s place as a
leader in Latin America and within this important market.
On a much smaller scale only, globalization strategies could encompass
two other policies: On the one hand, use could be made of the many languages
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spoken by Brazilians which are common to other countries, like German,
Japanese and Ukrainian, among others mentioned above. The development
of informal policies related to such languages are today more dependent on

the language-speaking communities themselves than on the Brazilian gov-
ernment. On the other hand, consideration could be given to policies that
back globalization through Portuguese. This could be by means of coopera-
tion with CPLP countries, through the Macau Forum with China, through
the more than eight million Portuguese speakers in the diasporas (where the
language is becoming a permanent feature in countries of importance such as
the United States) or through support for the growing community that uses
it as a foreign language, with a view to fostering economic opportunities.
We could work out from the framework above an outline of four linguis-
tic fronts for the internationalization of Brazilian institutions. If we were
to transform these fronts into proposals and set up a hierarchical order, we
could move towards a linguistic policy which would/will open up to citizens,
through their own institutions and linguistic resources, opportunities for
interaction with other cultures and economies. It might thus be possible to
do the following:
1. To increase the potential of internationalization of, and through, the

Portuguese language, by the development of relations internal to the
CPLP, associated countries (Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Mauritius) or
applicants for observer status (Namibia, Georgia); the Macau Forum,
between China and seven countries in which Portuguese is an offi-
cial language; the five economic blocs in which Portuguese is official
(the EU, Mercosul, ECOWAS, ECCAS, SADC, and, soon, ASEAN),
not forgetting the BRICS countries, which include a large part of the
population of the world, and the diasporas;
2. To deepen the strategic alliance between Portuguese and Spanish with
a potential for mutual intelligibility and operability that maximizes
the investment of time and effort, and with abundant conditions for a
policy of reciprocity, as in the example of the relation between Brazil
and Argentina;
3. To improve joint activity in English, for links with key work in sci-
ence and technology and for the translation of scientific research
carried out in Portuguese. Joint activity in English could have con-
siderable potential for reciprocity in relations with India and South
Africa, for example, countries in which English is an official lan-
guage, with important university centres, and with members of BRICS
(http://www. itamaraty.gov.br/temas/mecanismos- inter- regionais/

agrupamento-brics) and IBSA (http://www.ibsa-trilateral.org/).
4. To maximize Brazilian language resources, making use of the more
than 40 immigrant languages spoken in Brazil, as resources for inter-
nationalization. In connection with that strategy, it is important to map
the languages spoken at home in the country through the Population
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Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics—the
next one will occur in 2020—and then to recognize them as part of the
Brazilian cultural patrimony. They could be included in the National

Inventory of Language Diversity, currently being developed by the
Brazilian Ministry of Culture, and, finally, use could be made of them
in reconnection with their countries of origin, allowing for new eco-
nomic and human flows between Brazil and countries like Germany,
Italy and Japan, not to mention the Arab countries.
This hierarchy of fronts for internationalization would favour globaliza-

tion in Portuguese, that is, a globalization of the language, optimizing its
use abroad or with foreigners. This strategy would require a minor invest-
ment for Portuguese-speaking citizens and would increase their potential
presence in transnational encounters. It would also allow speakers of other
languages to take on (or to ‘consume’) a much greater range of products
through Portuguese, creating stronger links and therefore stronger economic
and cultural exchanges in the long term.
In this way, globalization through the Portuguese language, and con-
sequently investment in its internal and external promotion, would bring
maximum benefit. Some countries, like the Scandinavians, for example, offer
studies entirely in English to foreign students and have concentrated almost
all their scientific work in English. While permitting direct and improved
communication with the outside world, this strategy ends up hampering
access by foreigners to the range of significant cultural products circulating
in the national language. At the same time, this leads to more superficial
relationships between foreign students and the country where they have
studied and also exteriorizes linguistic benefits that will be taken up by
English-language countries. This reasoning is possible precisely because glo-
balization does not necessarily entail externalization.
In the second place, partnership with Spanish is an extremely interesting strat-
egy for the same reasons: it opens up a universe of markets and universities and
demands relatively little linguistic investment, given the good inter-intelligibility
of the two languages. Inevitably, in third place, the advantage of investing in
knowledge of English is unrivalled given the connection it provides with centres
of production of advanced knowledge, but it is important for Brazil to adopt
a clear standpoint with regard to diversifying its relations with the English-
language countries, exploring possibilities for reciprocity, permitting increased
demand for Portuguese in their universities and within their economic systems.
A country of immigration like Brazil finally has the possibility of using its
internal linguistic diversity to connect with the outside world, even if today
this strategy requires more regular investment, given the previous disinvest-
ment that disconnected these languages from their standards through the
suppression of schools, libraries and other institutions, in a manner that
effectively maintained their speakers in a state of illiteracy in any language
other than Portuguese.
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Wikipedia calls attention—in the entry “Globalization”—to the long and
complex process of internationalization of enterprises (including universi-
ties). Globalization is thus an objective, not a point of arrival and not an

intermediate point on a rigid scale. An enterprise can thus have a range of
stages, functioning simply regionally, nationally or (as shown below):
• Internationally: the local branches support the mother company by get-

ting additional sales or through supply. The company considers itself
essentially domestic, producing goods developed for the home market;
• Multinationally: the international side is no longer considered mar-
ginal. Market differences are recognized, and products as well as action
plans are adapted in accordance with local conditions. Local manage-
ment is given freedom of action;
• Globally: products are created for a world market, globally made in a
few factories with high levels of productivity. There is a high level of
coordination of activities, with centralization of management and of
certain key functions (e.g. research and development, production);
• Transnationally: the necessity to maintain global productivity with the
capacity to respond to local needs. The branches need the capacity to
respond to the needs of the respective markets. Resources are dispersed
but specialized, in the interests of productivity and flexibility.
Languages too can be regional, national, international, multinational, global

and transnational, taking part in the economy along with methods of manage-
ment and distribution. The relative limitation in the current strategies for the
globalization of Portuguese, amid the great potential given by the current his-
torical conjuncture, results therefore from the fact that it is—in management
terms—halfway between a purely national reality, without a coordinated effort
between Portuguese-speaking countries, and another reality, at the embryonic
stage, that already indicates a multinational stage, expressed by the very idea
of a CPLP and the initiatives for a common language policy.
To globalize the language, it is necessary to reinforce the actual movement
or tendency towards the globalization of its management, jointly building
up its technological reach and the diplomatic coordination of its global
transactions, considering the opportunities arising from the fact that it is a
polycentric language. Once this work is done, we can view Portuguese as a
prime location for the establishment of economic and cultural relations in
the global arena.
NOTES
1. The 10 countries in which Portuguese is an official language are Angola, Brazil,

Cape Verde, East-Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique,
Portugal, São Tomé e Príncipe and China (the Special Administrative Region
of Macau).
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2. EU (European Union); Mercosul (Common Market of the South); SADC
(Southern Africa Economical and Development Community); ECOWAS (Eco-
nomic Community of West African States); ECCAS (Economic Community of

Central African States); ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
3. PAIGC (Países Africanos pela Independência da Guiné e de Cabo Verde);
MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola); FRELIMO (Frente de
Libertação de Mozambique).
4. The Dentists’ Conflict was a diplomatic incident between Brazil and Portugal
caused by attempts to hinder the establishment of Brazilian dentists in Portugal.
5. For the sake of my argument, what I take into account in this part of the
chapter is the notion of the standard of use or so-called objective standard: a
prestigious variety used, for example, in TV news in each country, which has
the potential to influence social uses by propagating language performances.
Defining the term in this way, it is possible to accept that each country has its
own Portuguese standard of use.
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www.cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/csf/o-programa (accessed 17 January 2014).
Braudel, F. (1984). O mediterrâneo e o mundo mediterrânico na época de Felipe II
[The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II]. 2 vols.
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Calvet, L.-J. (2002). Le marché aux langues: les effets linguistiques de la mondiali-
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[The holders of power: formation of Brazilian political patronage]. Rio de
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Ferreira, J. P.; Maarten, J.; Almeida, G.; Correia, M.; Oliveira, G. M. (2012). The
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cal resources for a pluricentric language, in: Calzolari, N. (Conference Chair);
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1 Language Policy and Globalization

The Portuguese Language in

presence of the Portuguese language in the context of global multilingual-

• The internationalization of Portuguese;

Having been the first among languages in another period of globalization,

South American Nations), the International Postal Union etc.

Within the CPLP, Portuguese cohabits with approximately 339 different

RECENT HISTORY OF THE GEOPOLITICS OF

1. Dictatorship, conservative modernization, Colonial War and decolo-

to public services with the enlargement of the middle classes.

This last phase witnessed the emergence of Brazil as a global power, as a

China (Saraiva, 2012), as well as on the relative success of economic policies

THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED SOCIETY, MULTILINGUALISM

According to Marazzi (2009), the replacement of Ford-style mass-

respective houses in order, as well as changes in the international presence of

strong state and medium-strong free market, with state intervention

which French is growing the fastest in the world.

The political and linguistic history of Portuguese in the twentieth century

which, however, continued to be dependent on Portugal in matters to do

common good and contributing together. The major digital encyclopaedia

INDICATORS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF

The principal hypothesis of this section is that the maintenance of a divergent

1. The presence of the language on the internet and in digital lan-

so-called language industry and divides up the profits, creating a

access, on open TV, to standard European Portuguese through

The orthography of Portuguese was changed several times over the

In keeping with the cooperative lines of VOC, and as an expression of a

1. The Maputo Colloquium on Linguistic Diversity in CPLP Coun-

becoming an official UN language, as well as its position in

The colloquia prepared strategic themes for the II International Confer-

PORTUGUESE AS A TOOL FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION OF

a field of study already offered master’s degrees and doctorates in Brazil-

of informal policies related to such languages are today more dependent on

1. To increase the potential of internationalization of, and through, the

(http://www. itamaraty.gov.br/temas/mecanismos- inter- regionais/

Brazilian cultural patrimony. They could be included in the National

This hierarchy of fronts for internationalization would favour globaliza-

ties). Globalization is thus an objective, not a point of arrival and not an

• Internationally: the local branches support the mother company by get-

Languages too can be regional, national, international, multinational, global

1. The 10 countries in which Portuguese is an official language are Angola, Brazil,

nomic Community of West African States); ECCAS (Economic Community of

Brasil (2014). Ministério da Educação (Ministry of Education). Programa Inglês sem

Campinas: State University of Campinas (UNICAMP).

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