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Gilvan Müller de OLIVEIRA
Director, International Portuguese Language Institute
(Praia, Cape Verde)
Margarita CORREIA
Researcher, Institute for Theoretical and Computacional Linguistics
(Lisbon, Portugal)
Portuguese and the CPLP Languages in Cyberspace
Introduction
The CPLP, an international organization founded in 2000, brings together
all Portuguese-speaking countries, covering a territory of 10.7 million km 2 in
America, Africa, Europe and Asia, and a population of about 241 million. The
member countries are: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique,
Portugal, Sao Tome and Principe and East Timor.
The degree of proficiency in Portuguese language in different countries varies
from almost 100% in Portugal to less than 10% in Guinea Bissau and East
Timor, as other 339 languages are also spoken in the CPLP, of which 215
languages in Brazil, which accounts for 5% of the number of languages in the
world, set in roughly 6500.
Although the CPLP is the attempt of construction of an international parity
and democratic block, the expansion of Portuguese language was due to the
construction of a colonial empire in the same way as European commercial
colonialism in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Portuguese
colonial empire was the last of this tradition to disappear, and this only
occurred with the independence of African countries and East Timor in 1975.
The process of independence was achieved through armed struggle, called the
Colonial War (1961-1975), a conflict that lasted in some countries, in new
forms, till the late 1990’s or even the early 2000’s.
The colonial situation left two main by-products when it comes to languages.
On the one hand there was the impossibility of building the modern concept of
citizenship and the consequent lack of interest in schooling of the population
called “native”, with a low participation in the Portuguese language community,
low penetration of the Portuguese language, and very low level of literacy - the
monarchical Brazil becomes Republic in 1889 with 98% of illiterates, a figure
similar to that of Mozambique at the time of independence in 1975.
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