Ecossistemas plurilíngues: aprendizes tardios de língua adicional no contexto das línguas em contato do sul do Brasil

Abstract

The theme that motivated and continues to drive this research is plurilingualism and its relationship with Southern Brazil, a multilingual region that constitutes a setting of languages in contact. This study is configured as a case study, having as its point of departure and theoretical foundation Pluridimensional and Relational Dialectology (PRD), and receiving support and interface from Ecolinguistics in its methodological design; it is interdisciplinary in nature, given the complexity and scope of the topic. The focus of the study was placed on two plurilingual speakers, within the context that surrounds them as an ecosystem, their linguistic biographies, and their late learning of additional languages. PRD seeks to describe the variational continuum by comparing variables in the speech of informants from distinct social segments, men and women, older and younger, with higher and lower levels of schooling, under different social and geographical constraints, and thus provided this research with the dimensions through which the analyses were carried out. Based on a set of interdisciplinary instruments, we sought to observe, as if through a camera in focus, the plurilingual ecosystem of two individuals, grounding our comparisons, contrasts and convergences on the diassexual, diagerational, diastratic, diatopic and diareferential dimensions. In addition, we examined the individuals’ cognitive and motivational aspects in relation to their linguistic biographies. In this sense, in order to analyze the data collected within an interdisciplinary framework, we drew on complementary fields in order to obtain a careful perspective on plurilingual speakers, the languages that make up their contextual repertoires and linguistic biographies, their individual characteristics and their social environments. Thus, the methodological instruments were drawn from different areas of the language sciences, seeking to apply scales and tools already validated within the scientific community, such as the questionnaires of the Atlas of Languages in Contact at the Frontier (ALCF), intelligence quotient tests, and motivation to learn scales. Methodologically, this study focused on an exhaustive in depth examination of phenomena within the informants’ microcosm, allowing for broad and detailed knowledge of their profiles. A total of ten data collection instruments were employed, which were fundamental in ensuring the interdisciplinary character of the study. The individual and comparative analyses, grounded in PRD, showed that the two informants investigated, adult plurilingual speakers, construct contrasting linguistic psychosocial profiles in terms of sex, generation and schooling, while at the same time being brought together by trajectories marked by contact with immigration languages and by the everyday use of plurilingual repertoires in family and work settings. Immigration languages, Talian and Deutsch, appeared in their accounts as associated with family and local identity, whereas Portuguese occupied the position of the language of schooling; additional languages, English and Spanish, in turn, were evoked as strongly linked to academic and professional mobility, with an apparent mismatch between self perception and actual proficiency at certain points. The data allow us to state that intrinsic factors, life projects and the desire for development, and extrinsic factors, demands of the world of work and a multilingual regional context, motivated the late learning of languages and contributed to the preservation of the informants’ cognitive abilities in adulthood, countering the myth of the impossibility of learning languages later in life. In our conclusion, we show that plurilingual trajectories, interdisciplinary teaching experiences and reflective practices on linguistic biography foster metalinguistic awareness and the flexibilization of repertoires, indicating that formalized plural approaches need to be implemented in Southern Brazil in order to promote and enhance language learning in this region that has historically been constituted as multicultural and multilingual.