Lusophone Consciousness in “Uma Política Do Idioma”, by Celso Cunha

A Historiographic Analysis

Abstract

The history of the linguistics policies concerning a language and its teaching can be observed by the laws that used to govern them, by the disseminated didactic materials at the time and that directed the teaching in a certain moment, as well as by conferences, speeches and documents which presented and/or claimed necessary actions to constitute a language policy. In this sense, this research aims at analyzing the language policy proposal presented by Celso Cunha in conference, in the Ministry of Education and Culture, in 1963. The conference was later reproduced in the book Uma política do idioma (1964) and, according to the author, with additional notes as well as linguistic and philological foundations. It is a relevant work to understand the proposal of Cunha for National Education and, therefore, an important document for the understanding of the political-linguistic-educational context in which the discourse is uttered, as well as what are the conceptions of language and language policy that are immanent to them. In order to establish those relationships, it is necessary to look for fundamentals in the concepts of Koerner (1996). Still, as it is an act of communication in a political scene, we look, from the political discourse point of view (CHARAUDEAU, 2006), to observe the strategies of influence for the composition of Celso Cunha’s political-linguistic discourse.