“I speak English but i am still me” – English language practices in Alter do Chão, Brazil
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Silvia Cristina Barros de Souza Hall
Abstract
This article addresses how English language practices were performed, conducted and interpreted by six inhabitants of Alter do Chão village, a popular tourist destination for locals and with increasing numbers of tourists, located in the Amazon region, in the north of Brazil. Developed through an ethnographic perspective and based on the data analysis resulted from interviews and fieldwork, this article advocates, mainly, that people are creative in their linguistic encounters and that languages find their places in social practice. The article also sheds light on the spread of the English language and the encounters among languages and cultures that the technology and the recent mobility of people have facilitated. The results show that English language practices performed by the six participants in Alter do Chão village, often highlighted through hybrid language practices, are constituted by locally situated attitudes, related to their creative performances.
Acknowledgements
The data from this study derives from my PhD dissertation completed at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, originally entitled “‘I speak English, but I am still me’ – the roles of the English language in Alter do Chão, Brazil”. I wish to express my gratitude to professor Gloria Gil and to professor Maria Inez Probst Lucena, who were my supervisors, for their generous contributions.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Race, space and commerce in multi-ethnic Costa Rica: a linguistic landscape inquiry
- “I speak English but i am still me” – English language practices in Alter do Chão, Brazil
- Framing the diaspora and the homeland: language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora
- Who speaks what language to whom and when – rethinking language use in the context of European Schools
- “It sounds like the language spoken by those living by the seaside” – language attitudes towards the local Italo-romance variety of Ghanaian immigrants in Bergamo
- “An unrealistic expectation”: Māori youth on indigenous language purism
- Towards an understanding of African endogenous multilingualism: ethnography, language ideologies, and the supernatural
- Language threat in the United Arab Emirates? Unpacking domains of language use
- Transcending networks’ boundaries: losses and displacements at the contact zone between English and Hebrew
- Book Review
- Maria Sabaté i Dalmau: Migrant communication enterprises. Regimentation and resistance
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Race, space and commerce in multi-ethnic Costa Rica: a linguistic landscape inquiry
- “I speak English but i am still me” – English language practices in Alter do Chão, Brazil
- Framing the diaspora and the homeland: language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora
- Who speaks what language to whom and when – rethinking language use in the context of European Schools
- “It sounds like the language spoken by those living by the seaside” – language attitudes towards the local Italo-romance variety of Ghanaian immigrants in Bergamo
- “An unrealistic expectation”: Māori youth on indigenous language purism
- Towards an understanding of African endogenous multilingualism: ethnography, language ideologies, and the supernatural
- Language threat in the United Arab Emirates? Unpacking domains of language use
- Transcending networks’ boundaries: losses and displacements at the contact zone between English and Hebrew
- Book Review
- Maria Sabaté i Dalmau: Migrant communication enterprises. Regimentation and resistance
