Camões e a globalização da Língua Portuguesa

Abstract

CAMÕES AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE

Starting with the poem “Inês de Leiria” by Afonso Lopes Vieira, which was inspired by chapter 19 of Fernão Mendes Pinto Peregrinação [Pilgrimage], the article reports an experience that the latter author had in the interior of China in the middle of the 16th century: the meeting of a Chinese woman saying the Christian Lord’s Prayer, the only words she knew in Portuguese. This was enough to surprise the traveler and allow him an unexpected contact with his mother tongue. It is true that, at the time, the evolution of the language from Vulgar Latin had been completed surpassed, passing through the initial phase of the formation of Romance, followed by Galician-Portuguese, with the subsequent separation of Galician and Portuguese. The 16th century was the golden age of systematization, enrichment and vibrancy of the Portuguese language, brought about by a combined effort of eminent writers, including, in particular, António Ferreira and Luís de Camões, with the aim of creating a linguistic standard. Camões’ idiolect became a model (which would be recognized in the following centuries by grammarians, theorists and critics as a standard) at the same time when the Poet hailed himself as the ultimate symbol of national identity. Simultaneously, thanks to travels and contacts with other lands, peoples and cultures, the foundations of Portuguese as a contact language are laid at a global level, anticipating in modernity the national consciousness of a community of Portuguese-speaking countries, and emerging from the exchange with the native peoples the Creoles and Pidgins, in addition to the unexpected presence of our language in different geographical and linguistic horizons, which is why it was simultaneously and in Portuguese the largest database of the first great experience of globalization in the known world.