O idioma nacional: o português brasileiro em evidência a partir dos estudos de Antenor Nascentes

Abstract

This master’s thesis presents the contributions of Antenor de Veras Nascentes (1886-1972) to Brazilian linguistics. From the analytical device of Linguistic Historiography, it highlights his work O linguajar carioca (1922) and the monographic collection O idioma nacional, produced in five volumes (1926-1929), a work in which the author highlights the language spoken in Brazil at the same time as he rehearses a favorable defense of its teaching. At the time of its publications, topics were being discussed that would only be taken seriously several decades later, when questions about the specific characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese began to gain the center of research in Brazilian linguistics. The research method of Linguistic Historiography guides the development and organization of this dissertation, which is structured in five chapters. It also describes the life and work of Nascentes, focusing on his intellectual production, the influences sought by him for his research and studies. Fundamentally, this dissertation highlights an aspect of Nascentes’ work that is little publicized by Brazilian linguistics, his monographic series O Idioma Nacional. In it, the author discusses how the teaching of the national language should be, the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, which he considered different from the Lusitanian language. Therefore, the author considered it incongruous for Brazil to make use of Portugal’s language grammar or of manuals built on the basis of the European Portuguese variety for the teaching of Portuguese in Brazil. Nascentes addressed content that highlighted phonetic, morphological, syntactic and historical aspects of Brazilian Portuguese. In addition, he used this work to honor, as well as to praise, authors of Brazilian literature, who began to occupy places in the Nascentes’ classroom that were traditionally occupied by European authors. This way, this study places Nascentes in his time, showing his relationships with the intellectuals of his time, and a shared defense of a national language and literature. From the 1920s onwards, when the 100th anniversary of Brazil’s independence was celebrated, Nascentes laid the foundations for the study of Portuguese dressed in Brazilian national colors, the aspects that characterize the speakers of this language. Idioma Nacional is genuinely Brazilian Portuguese, a term that would gain scientific status with the maturation of Brazilian linguistics, as opposed to Lusitano Portuguese, as a way of establishing substantial dialectal differences.