West’s 3rd Tongue : Portuguese: A Language Comes of Age

In the stately upstairs chamber, with its high ceiling and dark wood furnishings, well-chosen words resounded splendidly as masters of the language matched verbal skill and polish. The Brazilian Academy of Letters was holding forth at its weekly meeting.

One member delivered a reverent homage to a long-dead founder of the academy. Another elaborately praised a favorite novel and proposed that it be honored with a place in the academy library.

Academy President Austregesilo de Athayde, 88, graciously introduced a visiting delegation of officials from Spain. The delegation’s leader responded with a short but similarly gracious speech in Spanish.

Linguistic Antagonisms

Everyone understood his words, though some may have winced at the staccato sharpness. In Brazil, where Portuguese is the official language, Spanish sounds familiar but can grate on the ear and stir old linguistic antagonisms.

If languages could be neurotic, Portuguese might have an inferiority complex. For centuries, it has suffered as the poor stepsister of Spanish in the family of Romance languages.

Some Spanish-speakers dismiss Portuguese as a corrupted dialect of their mother tongue. “Boneless Spanish,” they call it, deriding the supple softness of spoken Portuguese as compared to “real” Spanish.

In fact, however, Portuguese is a language in its own right, similar to Spanish but distinctly separate. The two have developed independently over the centuries from their common Latin and Iberian origins.

And although Portuguese has long been overshadowed and belittled, it is now coming of age, emerging at last as a major Western language. Largely because of Brazil’s burgeoning growth, the combined population of Portuguese-speaking countries has passed 170 million. In the Western world, only English and Spanish have more native speakers.

Journalistic Giant

The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, a journalistic giant unmatched by any Spanish-language newspaper, has calculated that more than 260 million people will speak Portuguese by the year 2000.

As Portuguese gains stature, however, another old neurosis is cropping up, a controversial identity crisis that revolves around deep differences between the language patterns of Portugal and Brazil.

At the center of the controversy is the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

On July 20, the academy will be 100 years old--100 years of “guarding the treasure of the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil,” as one academy member put it.

The 40 members, called “immortals,” include novelists, poets, historians, journalists and statesmen. They gather each Thursday afternoon for tea and elegant discourse at their downtown headquarters, an ornate old building in the classical French style.

The academy publishes members’ speeches in its annals, entombs their remains in its mausoleum, and chooses their replacements in deliberations that resemble the selection process of an exclusive club.

Athayde, a journalist with an unruly mane of white hair, has been the academy president since 1958. He said he has been kept in the post in appreciation of his administrative skills.

Rituals Criticized

Some critics accuse the academy of taking more interest in its internal business and rituals than in linguistic issues. They charge that the academy is tradition-bound and unwilling to recognize the full extent of language differences between Brazil and Portugal.

Athayde said he has no problem accepting unorthodox Brazilian innovations in Portuguese. “Today’s impurity goes into the dictionary tomorrow,” he said in an interview.

What Athayde does not accept is the subordination of Portuguese to Spanish. He recalled with a note of lingering indignation that he was once invited to speak in Spanish to a class at a New York university. The professor who invited him “did not know that Brazil was Portuguese-speaking,” Athayde said.

That was in the 1930s. Portuguese has come a long way since then, he observed, and continues to move up in the world.

“As Brazil is growing very rapidly, interest in Portuguese is growing,” he said.

The academy’s newest member, poet Ledo Ivo, agreed.

Language as Greatness

“Brazil has a calling for greatness,” Ivo said. “The Portuguese language that we speak is inseparable from that greatness.”

Ivo searched in the pockets of his suit and produced a letter from a graduate student at a university in New York who is planning to write a doctoral dissertation on Ivo’s poetry. The poet said the letter shows “the interest of American universities now in Brazilian literature.”

Brazil’s prolific literary production and book publishing industry also are helping to lift Portuguese into the category of languages that count. Last year, 259 million books were sold in Brazil, according to the Brazilian Book Chamber.

Aware of this market’s importance, increasing numbers of American authors are coming to Brazil on tours to promote Portuguese-language translations of their books.

At the same time, more and more Brazilian books are being translated into other languages. The novels of Jorge Amado, Brazil’s most widely read contemporary writer, have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Portugal’s Legacy

Five hundred years ago, Portuguese was spoken by little more than 1 million people, the inhabitants of Portugal. It was a language still in the process of formation when Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500.

Portugal’s importance as a colonial power peaked in the 17th Century, then slowly faded. Portuguese literature had its bright flashes but never rekindled the brilliance of 16th-Century poet Luis de Camoes.

On gaining its independence in 1822, Brazil displaced Portugal as the biggest Portuguese-speaking nation. African independence movements in the 1970s added five other nations to the list of countries where Portuguese is the official language: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe.

The most populous of those countries are Mozambique, with 13 million people, and Angola, with 8 million. Although Angolans and Mozambicans speak mainly African tribal languages, government authorities in both countries have set goals of universal literacy in Portuguese.

Portugal’s move to democracy in 1975 after 43 years of dictatorship and its strengthened ties with the European Communities also have extended the reach of the Portuguese language. But with a population of 10 million, Portugal’s international impact is limited compared to Brazil’s.

Growing Mass Market

Today, Brazil’s economy is the eighth largest in the West, and its 140 million people make it the world’s sixth most populous nation. The growing Brazilian middle class has provided an increasingly important mass market for newspapers, magazines and books.

However, one book Brazil does not have is a complete and modern dictionary.

“A cultured language has to have a dictionary,” said Antonio Houaiss, a lexicographer and member of the Academy of Letters. Houaiss, 71, is compiling a major dictionary that he hopes will be published in 1991.

He said the volume will contain about 300,000 words. Brazil’s best dictionary currently, called the Aurelio, has about 110,000 words, only one-fourth the number contained in a vocabulary that Houaiss compiled in 1981 for the academy.

One problem for dictionary editors is the long-standing controversy over how Portuguese should be written and spoken. There are major differences between Brazil and Portugal in vocabulary, syntax, spelling and accent marks.

“The Portuguese language is the only language of a large culture that officially has two different spelling codes,” Houaiss said. “The dictionaries of Brazil are no good in Portugal and the dictionaries of Portugal are no good in Brazil.”

Accord on Spelling

In addition to his dictionary project, Houaiss has been the leader of an effort to arrange an international agreement to unify Portuguese spelling. Last May, delegates from the seven Portuguese-speaking nations met in Brazil and agreed on a standard spelling code. To take effect, the code must be ratified by the seven governments.

According to some observers, the new code will have a powerful supporter in Brazilian President Jose Sarney, who is a poet and a member of the academy. But approval is far from certain in either Brazil or Portugal.

In Portugal, the new proposed agreement has already met stiff opposition in the press. Houaiss said the opposition is deep-seated among influential Portuguese nationalists.

“They are trying to preserve what they feel is the essence of their identity,” he said.

A previous effort to unify Portuguese spelling was rejected in 1945 by the Brazilian Congress for the same reason.

“Unification won’t work,” said Bella Jozef, a literature professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “I think it would be a crime.”

Afranio Coutinho, author of several books on Brazilian literature, agreed with Jozef and went further, suggesting that Brazil’s language should not be called Portuguese.

Cookies and Talk

“It should be called the Brazilian language,” he said.

Coutinho and Jozef were having tea at the Academy of Letters. Polite talk around a large table heaped with cakes and cookies is the traditional prelude to the academy’s weekly meeting.

Out of deference to conservative academy colleagues, Coutinho refrained from pursuing his argument for a separate Brazilian language. And soon the immortals retired to their meeting chamber to discourse upon other matters.

In a later interview, Coutinho criticized the academy for taking little interest in Brazil’s linguistic independence. Most of its members lean toward the “purist” school, which accepts Portugal’s language standards, he said.

“The academy does nothing,” he grumbled.

Fellow academy member Abgar Renault, a poet, acknowledged that Brazil has made “profound alterations” in the language that must be recognized, but he insisted: “Not because of that will I accept that Portuguese be named the Brazilian language. . . . It would be tantamount to saying that the English written and spoken in the United States is not English but American.”