Multilinguismo nos Palop: perfil sociolinguístico e avaliação linguística em Guiné-Bissau

Abstract

In Portuguese-Speaking African Countries (PALOP), the Portuguese is in contact with other languages and, in certain contexts, with ethnic languages, already present in those territories in the pre-colonial period. Considering these situations of linguistic contact, we seek to present reflections on the sociolinguistic context of multilingual speakers from Guinea-Bissau, associating the sociolinguistic characterization of the community with the evaluation of the languages in contact. As the main theoretical support, we employ the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1966, 2008). The results employed in the discussion come from a corpus composed of 100 surveys collected among Guinean students in Guinea-Bissau and Brazil (RUBIO; CÁ, 2019; CÁ; RUBIO, 2019). The results show, in the community, a high status of the Portuguese language, despite the use of other local languages in everyday situations. There is a functional division in the use of languages among multilingual speakers inserted in this reality.