HEARING, MOTHER FATHER DEAF: Hearing People in Deaf Families

Brazilian Codas: Libras and Portuguese in Contact Zones

197 Brazilian Codas: Libras and Portuguese in Contact Zones Ronice Müller de Quadros and Mara Lúcia Masutti Brazil is still considered a monolingual country whose official language is Portuguese. Nevertheless, there are many other languages spoken , making it a multilingual country. As stated by Oliveira, In Brazil nearly 210 languages are spoken by nearly one million Brazilian citizens for whom Portuguese is not their mother tongue, yet this makes them no less Brazilian. Nearly 190 languages are autochtones, that is, indigenous languages from various linguistic trunks such as Apurinã, Xokléng, Iatê, and nearly 20 are allochtones , that is, from immigration, which share our national being alongside the indigenous languages and the language that has been official for 200 years, as is the case of German, Italian and Japanese . (2005) All the languages mentioned by Oliveira are Brazilian and are used by the Brazilian people, and for this reason, they need to be recognized by official policies that guarantee their preservation as languages that are as legitimate as Portuguese (Oliveira, 2005). Nevertheless, Brazil’s linguistic politics are insufficient to sustain the conservation of the country’s different languages. The linguistic movement in Brazil is similar to those taking place in some European countries that maintain the pretense of a linguistic unity that favors one language to the detriment of others, as discussed by Grosjean (1982) and Lapierre (1988), among others. Brazil’s long-term policies on its border regions and Brazilian Sign Language have been gradually changing. New programs are being developed for indigenous schools and schools for deaf students. For example , the Brazilian Constitution of 1998 recognized the Brazilian indigenous people, a decisive step in the preservation of their languages. This research had partial support from CAPES/PROESP. 198 : m ü l l e r d e q u a d r o s a n d m a s u t t i Since then, the linguistic rights of indigenous peoples have been considered viable in different spheres of society, including education. Many schools have set policies for using an indigenous language as the language of instruction, with Portuguese as the second language. In addition , programs have been established for nonindigenous languages in cities that demonstrate a type of “cultural patrimony” based on linguistic factors. Linguistic policies are now leading to bilingual educational programs . In recent years, some important linguistic policies have empowered signers of Língua Brasileira de Sinais (Libras). BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE Libras is the language used by the Deaf community in Brazil. It is a language that expresses different degrees of linguistic levels, as do other languages; it has a grammar with its own structure and is used by a specific social group (Quadros & Karnopp, 2004). In Brazil, Deaf associations facilitate contact between deaf people in different regions of the country and ensure the survival of sign language among generations of deaf people and their deaf families. Parties, contests, and national meetings provide social interaction for deaf people and a way to develop Deaf culture and language. Support for sign languages, however, has not been historically reflected in Deaf education in Brazil; it has only occurred as a method of resistance to a system that has long denied a place for sign language. Resistance to sign language has significantly diminished in Brazil in the past decade (Skliar & Quadros, 2005). Given the scarcity of schools for deaf students in Brazil, the generations of deaf people from the 1930s and 1940s did not have many opportunities to study. Back then, the country had only two deaf schools: the Instituto Santa Terezinha in São Paulo and the Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos in Rio de Janeiro. For this reason, only a few deaf people from these generations attended those institutions. Many deaf people had no formal education and faced personal hardships that were compounded by the economic situations of their families. In the 1950s, institutions began establishing special education programs for those people considered to be disabled in some way, whether mentally or physically (in this case, linguistically). Some of these programs offered an oralist approach to education. The institutes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro eventually Brazilian Codas : 199 adopted an oral approach, shifting the focus to teaching the deaf students to speak. Consequently, although this generation of deaf people received some instruction, they suffered from the lack of access to sign language and from strong social messages of...