Orthography matters!: the ideologies, insecurities and global politics of the 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement

Abstract

This paper explores linguistic ideologies surrounding The 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement. The reform, which aims to uniformize Lusophone orthographies and strengthen Portuguese as a global language, is approached through the reactions of native speakers participating in an online debate within a Portuguese-language blog. Drawing on the notion that language planning is a personal, political and ideological rather than a purely linguistic enterprise, the study focuses on the social meanings assigned to Portuguese orthography by the Lusophone debaters. Upon so doing, it tracks the different ideologies orienting participants’ arguments for or against the reform, showing the interplays of language ideologies with culture, nation and citizenship; how linguistic practices and language-mediating technologies, like orthography, become sites of ideological (re)production; and how “folk” and “expert” perspectives about language are not distant but rather dialectically inform and implicate one another, with local debate discourses embedded within broader and older social process and relations.

Speaking their language – Development of a multilingual decision-support tool for communicating invasive species risks to decision makers and stakeholders

“…Similar to the S-FISK issue (i.e. Mexican vs Castilian Spanish), one of the difficulties encountered by the Portuguese author-translators of AS-ISK was with the Orthographic Agreement (see Washington, 2018) ratified by countries where Portuguese is a primary or official language (mainly Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East-Timor). Similar to English (e.g.…”