Multilingual Brazil ― Language Resources, Identities and Ideologies in a Global Era

This book brings together cutting edge work by Brazilian researchers on plurilingualism in Brazil for an English-speaking readership in one comprehensive volume. Divided into four sections, each with its own introduction, tying together the themes of the book, the volume charts a course for a new sociolinguistics of multilingualism, challenging long-held perceptions about a monolingual Brazil by exploring the different policies, language resources, ideologies and social identities that have emerged in the country's contemporary plurilingual landscape. The book elucidates the country's linguistic history to demonstrate its evolution to its present state, a country shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces both locally and globally, and explores different facets of today's plurilingual Brazil, including youth on the margins and their cultural and linguistic practices; the educational challenges of socially marginalized groups; and minority groups' efforts to strengthen languages of identity and belonging. In addition to assembling linguistic research done in Brazil previously little known to an English-speaking readership, the book incorporates theoretical frameworks from other disciplines to provide a comprehensive picture of the social, political, and cultural dynamics at play in plurilingual Brazil. This volume is key reading for researchers in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, cultural studies, and Latin American studies.

Marilda C. Cavalcanti is Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, where she is also a CNPq/Brazil researcher.

Terezinha Machado Maher is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in bilingual education and language and diversity.