ABSTRACT
This work aims to analyze the situation of the Portuguese language in East Timor, which is part of the Portuguese-speaking community, with regard to social functions performed by the Portuguese language in that country and to linguistic policies of the language diffusion. The methodology will include its development in two stages: the first concerns to the collecting of a bibliography about the linguistic status of East Timor, focusing on the status of the Portuguese as the official language in this country in relation to policies of diffusion of it; the second presents a linguistic-discursive analysis of the speeches of the twenty East Timor universities formed from the corpus of the Variation and Speech Processing and Discourse Project: analysis and applications (PROFALA), in view of the explanation of the social functions conveyed in the words of students through metalinguistic survey focused on the official language.
Key-words:
social function of language; Portuguese language; language policy; East Timor