Colonialismo, cultura e variação linguística: a língua inglesa como patrimônio da humanidade.

Abstract

The English language has, for too long, been a source of debates regarding the reasons for its adoption as a language of global relations to the detriment of other languages, thus raising questions concerning its social role, perception as a colonial remnant, a mechanism for domination, maintenance of power, social protagonism and imposition of behavioral patterns. For this reason, this TCC has the general pursuit of observing languages - particularly the English language - from a humanist standpoint of valuing the sociable, aiming to discuss them as a heritage of humanity. More particularly, to analyze and discuss colonialism and its social substrates, culture as a means of valuing people and their cultural identities, and highlighting linguistic variations as a natural phenomenon and a trait of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity that spoils traditional way of thinking about colonial language as a simple means to oppression. Therefore, it was necessary to investigate, through a bibliographic study, the historical and cultural processes of the English language's expansionism, understand how it behaved in present history, and describe its current arrangement in the global state. To this end, authors such as Harari (2012), Bakhtin (2006), Parker (1995), and Anjos (2017) were used as theoretical bases to portray the origins of the human species, the concepts of language, the expansionism of the British Empire and the emergence of Applied Linguistics (AL); Torres (2007), Santos (2009), and Mignolo (2007) over discussing colonialism and culture; Brown and Attardo (2005), Calvet (2002) and Hooks (2013) on sociolinguistics and linguistic variation. Thus, we infer that language as a producer and or product of human interactions permeates its state as a communicative structure, and it becomes the essence of cultural enrichment, wherefore it transfigures the social construction of perception of language as a villain and deviant, given the lack of impetus in immaterial and non-human structures.