Retrotopias linguísticas : a língua nacional como ferramenta de revivificação do nacionalismo

Abstract

In this doctoral thesis, I seek to verify how the linguistic retrotopia movement is interpreted in publications made on virtual environments, specifically on Facebook. In the research, with interpretativist (MOITA LOPES, 1994) and documental approach (RAMALHO; RESENDE, 2011), posts made in this social network are understood as research materials of formal nature, whose meanings are manifested according to the researcher's vision, position supported by the perspective of the Interdisciplinary Applied Linguistics and reinforced by Moita Lopes (2004; 2006; 2008). Such publications constitute a main corpus composed of sixteen posts, taken from public Facebook profiles. The theoretical framework consists of a bibliographic review of the concept of national language based on studies by Freire (1920), with the intention of demonstrating that the discussion surrounding its understanding is not recent. Subsequently, I turn to authors associated with the field of language studies, such as Mignolo (2003), and relate their ideas to studies by Zolin-Vesz (2015), Cervo (2014), Branco (2015) and Di Renzo (2012) to present how, in the last decades, this theme has been the reason for the production of several works that aim to discuss aspects related to the national language and how educational institutions have been configured as places of its legitimation, which ended up by serving as the basis for many of today’s understandings, especially within the academic environment, as claimed by Zolin-Vesz and Jesus (2019). To propose an understanding of linguistic retrotopia, I use a concept initially used by Bauman (2017b), to seek to understand how the national language continues to be the subject of discussion and how the debate about it is still recurrent. As support for the defense of this point of view, I also seek the arguments of authors such as Foucault (2004), Fabricio (2006) and Silva (2015). The question that guided the research was: How does the linguistic retrotopia movement is interpreted in the construction of posts published on Facebook? With the results obtained, it could be concluded that there is, in contemporary times, a movement to recover a discourse that privileges the national language and its rules determined by normative grammar to the detriment of linguistic practice considered marginal, a movement that is related to linguistic retrotopia, which I defined as the use of the national language as a tool for recovering an ideal past and as a marker of stability.