A expansão linguística espanhola na China e no Brasil: convergências, deslocamentos e assimetrias

Abstract

In 2018 the press devoted quite significant attention to promoting Spanish in China. With approximately 1.4 billion inhabitants, this Asian country is the most recente strategic objective of the expansion of Spanish as a foreign language carried out by the Spanish State. Events such as the creation of an agreement between the Real Academia de la Lengua española (RAE) and the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), and the inclusion of the Spanish language in the country's Basic Education curriculum had an enthusiastic highlight in the press and also in the RAE news forum. This work aims to carry out a comparative analysis - trying to detect convergences and divergences - between the current promotion of Spanish in China and the promotion of Spanish in Brazil, which had its peak in the 90s and in the first decade of the 2000s. Adopting the glotopolitical approach (ARNOUX, 2000) as a theoretical presupposition, there is an attempt here to detect ideologies that arise in the Spanish discursive promotion in each case, which consequently reveals important aspects of these linguistic planning processes related to the political, economic and ideological fields.