Language, Literacy and Linguistic Diversity in Portugal: Past and Present Discourses

Abstract

This paper traces some accounts of what it means to be good readers, writers and speakers of languages in discourses about literacy and linguistic diversity in recent Portuguese history. Discourses about literacy as decontextualised skills and literacy as contextualised practice emerged and re-emerged in cyclical fashion inside and outside national territorial borders, at local, national and global scales from the Estado Novo’s moral politics to the global liberal politics regarding the Portuguese language in the early 21st century. I point to the need to follow trajectories of language and literacy discourses as they intersect with other discourses related to class, race, ethnicity or nation and I propose a historical, ecological and material approach to literacy-in-action in multilingual Portuguese speaking contexts, an approach which would be based on multi-sited collaborative research.