Literature and the Formation of Brazilian Portuguese: A Historiographic Metafiction of Linguistic Contacts

Abstract

Studies and discussions about the contacts between peoples and languages in Brazil have often been the subject of study in linguistics, especially Contact sociolinguistics, and History. However, by taking literary texts as a way of glimpsing the past, albeit through the eyes of fiction, literature has a lot to contribute to how we see the past, especially because of historiographic metafiction that is interested in gaps in official historiography, (re)presenting historical events and/or facts, but through the eyes of characters who have been marginalized. Bearing this in mind, this article proposes an analysis of the novel Um defeito de cor, by the author from Minas Gerais, Ana Maria Gonçalves (2021), to illustrate how literary writing can contribute to understanding the forms of interaction that have shaped Brazilian society, giving rise to “Brazil” and, especially, to “Brazilian Portuguese.”