(Re)constructing a history of the future: the emergence of Brazilian Portuguese in the cultural debate of Brazil at the end of the eighteenth century

Abstract

In the wake of Tarallo’s (1993) well-known diagnosis of the emergence, at the end of the 19th century, of a Brazilian grammar that was radically different from the Lusitanian one, this article intends to focus on the ongoing linguistic-cultural debate that accompanied this process of differentiation between the two varieties of Portuguese in Brazil, and which certainly goes beyond mere grammatical codification. In this sense, instead of the Brazilian grammars of the Portuguese language, the production of which intensified from the 1880s onwards, the field of research here will consist of a single work, O idioma do hodierno portugal comparado com o do Brazil (1879), by the philologist José Jorge Paranhos da Silva and apparently separate from that grammaticalographic strand, In fact, it is the ‘first text that deals systematically with the Portuguese spoken in Brazil’ (Cavaliere, 2019), and where we can perhaps glimpse the seminal, albeit controversial, dawning of an imaginary, at least in formation, of what the Brazilian Portuguese of the future will be.

Keywords
brazilian portuguese; european portuguese; Paranhos da Silva; end of the 19th century