O português do(a) surdo(a) no rizoma das línguas brasileiras

Abstract

The conception of Brazilian Portuguese is linked to the eurocentric scientific rationality that keeps the geopolitics of Brazilian languages based on the political power of the imperial language, from the colonizer, and the colonization. This Western thought determines the political importance of writing about orality as well as of the oral language spoken by a minority of Brazilians in relation to Portuguese as a language of so many other linguistic communities and establishes a logic of vertical hierarchical organization of Brazilian languages. This form of political stratification of languages operates for the maintenance of the coloniality of power, knowledge and language over historically subalternized peoples. Based on the notions of “root-tree” and “fasciculated-root” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011), we look to reflect on the ideological construction of Brazilian monolingualism from political postures that institute the imperial power of Brazilian Portuguese in a pluri/multilingual sociolinguistic organization. From this reflection, we propose a theoretical extension of the notion of “rhizome” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011) for the context of linguistic policies as an alternative to the supervaluation of a language over others that coexist in the same territory. In the rhizomatic perspective of language, the deaf’s Portuguese, as well as the Portuguese of other historically subalternized linguistic communities, is inserted in the Brazilian linguistic rhizome to destabilize the hegemony and the linguistic coloniality and give visibility to a new geopolitics of the Brazilian languages.

Keywords: Coloniality of language. Deaf’s Portuguese. Linguistic rhizome.