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On the other hand, colonial language policies or those already independent
States, as in the case of Brazil, led to the exclusion of the other languages of
virtually every prestigious areas of circulation, which meant that, at best, its
use continued in oral language, out of institutions without building standards
or instruments related to writing.
The Portuguese in Cyberspace
The era of digitization of the languages found the world of Portuguese languages
unprepared for the challenges of the Millennium Goals and the conformation
of the Information Society in relation to the corpus of the languages, but also
with regard to Internet access and to the necessary schooling of populations to
participate in virtual communities.
Nevertheless, the Portuguese is the fifth most used language on the Internet,
with 87 million users, a figure growing rapidly, following the rapid growth of
school population in the last 15 years and the improvement of logistics for the
provision of access, as the supply of electricity.
The Portuguese on the Internet is currently treated as two languages:
Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, which results from the fact that we are
facing a pluricentric language (rather bicentric), presenting two very different
standards (Portuguese and Brazilian), particularly with regard to spelling:
Portugal followed for decades the established spelling Orthographic Agreement
of 1945, while Brazil was ruled by the Orthographic Form of 1943.
This treatment of the Portuguese on the Internet as if it were two different
languages weakens its position and international exposure, so it would be
desirable that this situation should be reversed.
The Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese language in 1990, which
was ratified by six of the CPLP countries, which is already in force in Brazil
and Portugal (although in this country the transition phase between the two
spellings is still on going until 2015) opens the prospect that Portuguese might
come to be treated in a unified way on the Internet, as in this context, the
spelling issues are very important to the weight they have in the construction
of computational tools of production and recovery of contents.
One of the aspects relevant to evaluate the weight of an international language
and its vitality is its ability to respond to the challenges posed by science and
technology in terms of scientific output in that language.
As such, the presence of scientific texts in Portuguese is one of the parameters to
consider when trying to portray the presence of this language on the Internet.
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