A perda de uma língua: os contextos sociais da perda linguística

Abstract

By using narratives, this text deals with the loss of languages in which speakers, for external (social) reasons, went through a process of linguistic and communicative loss. Three adults volunteered to participate in this project. The data collection was carried out through open interviews, which allowed the construction of the narratives about their life stories marked by immigration and the passage of a productive and receptive bilingualism to a loss situation in which subjects see the former domain of a language decline in several ways, reaching a strictly receptive use of a previously spoken language. The narratives were analyzed through the perspective of sociocognitive and sociopragmatic theories in order to investigate the phenomenon of losing a language due to social contexts and factors. The loss of a language, caused by external factors, is a phenomenon that has to do mainly with two contexts which are essential to speakers linguistic and communicative evolution: family and school contexts. This paper examines these contexts in life stories narrated by speakers, filtered by their subjectivity and by the interpretations these speakers gave to the phenomenon of losing, although partially, a language.