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As linguist, we always have to deal with terms like First, Second and Foreign Languages, but many times we don’t notice, how peculiars they are and how specific and difficult are their definitions. In Brazil, we have peculiar situations of immigrant languages, which are spoken in some groups of people in some communities in their day-by-day. There is much controversy related to the denomination we give to these linguistic varieties, what concerns its status and its relationship with the other neighbor or concurrent varieties. In this paper, we intend to discuss theoretically the terms above, transporting the denomination and its application to the reality of some bilingual communities from Rio Grande do Sul, in which people speak minority languages of Germanic origins. On the basis of empirical tests, we aim to give here a profile of the socio linguistic situation of these minority varieties what concerns its speakers, the foreign language teachers (specially of the High-German) and the community in general.
Based on the bilingualism and ethnolinguistic identity research, this study aims to observe the role identity and linguistic attitudes play in a minority mother language’s maintenance or shifting process in early bilingualism cases in a societal bilingualism situation. The analyzed context comprises native speakers of essentially bilingual communities that migrate to an urban center like Porto Alegre, where the opportunities for minority mother language use are drastically restrained by the monolingual Portuguese context. It’s asked how this language was maintained and what is the identity and linguistic attitude after the removal of the original context identified as more rural, isolated and ethnic and culturally different. The data collection derives from semi-structured interviews, recorded and subsequently transcribed. The data analysis suggests that the ‘geographic’ factor isn’t so relevant to the maintenance/shifting of a minority language than the speaker’s ‘micro-decisions’ to preserve the cultural and affectionate ties with their origin group, the family. Besides family group, community, school and government should be called to come together to construct new ways for the linguistic and cultural preservation of the bilingual community in Brazil. In that sense, this research intends to contribute to a wider understanding of the identity and linguistics attitudes’ role in the languages’ teaching and learning in general.
This paper aims to contribute to the rich discussion that has been developed in this journal throughout previous editions. Many authors have already written here about their considerations and praxis regarding bilingualism, bilingual contexts and bilingual education from different perspectives. Thus, this paper also brings to discussion aspects of the education in bilingual settings in Brazil, where people speak Portuguese and a variety of German basis called Hunsrückisch as their mother tongue. Moreover, this paper aims to be an account of results from different researches, which deal with the advantages of speaking dialect to learn standard German and the prejudices, learners coming from minority languages confront.
One of the most striking moments in the life of Brazilian children speaking a minority language happens when they go to elementary school. There, the attitude towards the family language is completely indifferent, if not openly hostile, since the school sees its duty limited to alphabetising the child in the official language, which is Portuguese. This article reflects on practical strategies for teaching school children speaking immigrant languages, focussing on the different meaning of alphabetisation in minority language contexts and on the advantages of early bilingualism, ascertained by research in cognitive science (cf. Bialystok 2005). Immigrant contexts of this nature are being studied in the linguistic atlas project ALMA-H (Atlas Linguístico-Contatual das Minorias Alemãs na Bacia do Prata - Hunsrückisch). Based on data from this project and considering the Brazilian educational context the article proposes strategies that could help to improve the alphabetisation process of those groups by reconciling the dissociation that separates school contexts from family contexts in areas of collective bilingualism in Brazil.