Ladinos e boçais

Abstract

This dissertation aims the sociolinguistic dimension of the enslaved Africans' experience brought to Brazilian Empire by the illegal slave trade, that Joaquim Nabuco called the "Trilogy of hell," staged in "Africa", "the ocean" and "plantations" in southeastern Brazil. My goal was to investigate how Africans' linguistic repertoire helped to build the South Atlantic "strophes and prosodies" and address the issue of communication in each stage of the illegal slave trade to seek understand how the formation of new languages and the subsequent cultural exchanges were mobilized by enslaved Africans in daily struggle against massive illegal enslavement in the Brazilian Empire between 1831 and c.1850. Given the importance of the Atlantic routes that connected southeastern Brazil to Congo region and Angola, this research has focused its attention on Central Africans and their language skills, that is, how they learned and handled Portuguese language, negotiated speech communities from their mother tongues and exchange its cultural baggage. Thus, it becomes possible understand how the "language question" was linked with economic and power relations during Brazilian contraband and illegal enslavement amidst the process of State building in Brazilian Empire.