Widely spoken but 'minor'? Portuguese seeks respect

More people speak Portuguese as their native language than speak French, German, Italian or Japanese. So it can rankle members of that community of 230 million people to find that when they travel elsewhere that the rest of the world often views their mother tongue as a "minor" language whose leading novelists, poets and songwriters also tend to be overlooked.

But now an effort is being made here in the largest Portuguese- speaking city in the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country to remedy that situation. A "Museum of the Portuguese Language," complete with the latest in multimedia displays and interactive technology, recently opened here and is dedicated to the proposition that Portuguese speakers and their language can benefit from a bit of self-affirmation and self-advertisement.

"We hope this museum is the first step to showing ourselves, our culture and its importance to the world," said Antonio Carlos Sartini, the director of the museum, said to be the only in the world devoted specifically to a language. "A strategy to promote the Portuguese language has always been lacking, but from now on, maybe things can take another path."

Inaugurated in March, the museum has become the most widely visited in Brazil, drawing schoolchildren and scholars as well as tourists from Brazil and African countries like Angola and Mozambique. But in the interests of linguistic harmony and unity, it sidesteps one basic issue: whether dominion over the language ultimately rests with the country where it was born or the rambunctious, overgrown former colony where it is most widely spoken.

George Bernard Shaw once described the United States and Britain as "two countries divided by a common language." Much the same could be said about Brazil and Portugal, even though any competition is bound to be uneven, since Brazil has more than 185 million people and Portugal has barely 11 million.

At issue is not just the contrast between the mellifluous, musical accent with which Brazilians speak the language "Portuguese with sugar," in the words of the writer Eca de Queiroz and the clipped, almost guttural sound the language retains in Portugal. There are also some differences in usages so marked that they have traditionally led to misunderstandings and provided fodder for jokes.

In Portugal, for example, one of the words used to describe a queue is to Brazilians a derogatory slang term for a homosexual. Other differences can be more innocuous but no less baffling: a word that Portuguese use for a man's suit of clothes, for example, means a fact or piece of information in Brazil.

In addition, some purists in Portugal object to the slangy, colorfully casual version of the language that is spoken here and increasingly spread abroad through Brazilian telenovelas, or soap operas. They regard such informality as unworthy of the language of Camoes, the 16th-century poet whose seafaring epic "Os Lusiadas" is often compared to Homer and Dante.

In 1996, Brazil and Portugal joined with five African countries Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe to found the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries.

Portuguese was recently designated an official language of the Organization of African Unity as a result of the Community's efforts, but leaders think that more can be done and hope Brazil can lead the way.

"One of our objectives is to disseminate Portuguese so that it has greater visibility in international organizations," Jose Tadeu Soares, deputy director general of the group, said by telephone from its headquarters in Lisbon.

"But aside from Brazil and Portugal, the other countries have only been independent for 25 or 30 years and don't have the resources to project themselves on the world stage the way Brazil can."

Though the Community recently granted observer status to China, where the language still enjoys official status in Macao, Portuguese is fading there and in places like Goa, Damao and Diu in India, three other former colonial outposts. But when East Timor obtained its independence from Indonesia in 2002 and joined the Community, that inspired an outpouring of sympathy, support, donations and volunteers here and in other Portuguese-speaking countries.

"For the Timorese, Portuguese is a way of asserting their identity vis-a-vis Indonesia, and, for that matter, even Australia," Luiz Fernando Valente, director of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, said by telephone from Providence, Rhode Island.

But, he added, the aspiration of some Portuguese-speakers to see their language gain official status at the United Nations is probably beyond reach. "Portuguese is a global language, spoken on every continent," he said, "but it is not an international language, used in diplomacy and business the way that French is, and I don't know if that problem is solvable."

Sartini said that in hopes of disseminating Portuguese language and culture, the museum here plans to send roving exhibitions abroad, beginning next year. Ideally, he said, such displays would visit not only countries that recognize Portuguese as their official language but also those that have Portuguese-speaking communities or minorities, among them the United States.

In the United States, the largest and oldest such enclave is found in New England, in the area around Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence. But Portuguese-language communities also exist in California's Central Valley, around Fresno, for example, as well as in south Florida, where recent immigrants from Brazil have clustered around Fort Lauderdale, and the Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey.

At a literary festival near here in August, though, the Anglo- Pakistani writer Tariq Ali was quoted in the local press as saying that only three languages are assured of surviving to the end of this century: English, Chinese and Spanish. Even Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate who lives mostly in Spain, has fretted publicly over the possibility of Portuguese being overwhelmed by English and Spanish "in an accelerated process of change."

Because of similarities to their own language, Spanish-speakers have sometimes jokingly dismissed Portuguese as simply "Spanish, badly spoken." But because of Brazil's huge size and dynamic economy, cities like Buenos Aires and Santiago in neighboring countries are now awash in flyers and billboards of language schools that offer Portuguese courses.

"For 850 years, our neighbors next door have been saying that there is no future for Portuguese," Soares said, referring to Spain.

"But here we are, still. The dynamic for the language may come from Brazil, but there is no doubt in my mind that Portuguese as a language will remain viable."

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