Brazzil
March 2001
Language
The Brazilian press has been making a huge fuss over a recent proposal by Communist party congressman Aldo Rebelo which could create laws "protecting" the country's official language, Portuguese, from excessive influence from foreign tongues, especially English, as has recently been done in some European countries, such as France.
Rebelo, in his proposal, wants to stop the so-called abuse of English-language words in situations when there is a suitable translation, such as in "cash"(dinheiro), "teen" (adolescente) or "delivery"(entrega). The controversy has generated a reasonably heated debate in Brazil, and no one sees an ending of the ongoing discussion over the issue in the near future.
In the meantime, U.S. businessmen have recently flooded New York language schools demanding to learn Portuguese, to a point that most of them cannot find suitable instructors to comply with the current demand for Portuguese, as related to me by a foreign language program coordinator at a popular school in the Wall Street area.
In an informal conversation, he told me that the demand has been troubling for them, since it is hard to find fully qualified native speakers of Portuguese who are not looking to work illegally in this country. I wonder why those centers don't make the move to sponsor Portuguese-speaking immigrants if the need is so great.
He was unable, though, to give me any information as to why Portuguese has been more sought after than other foreign languages. Although it is true that the globalization of economy has forced Americans—the ultimate monolingual citizens—to learn the languages spoken by their foreign, better-trained, English-speaking competitors, students have more recently sought out to learn the Portuguese language more than they have looked for Spanish (the most obvious option), German, French or, say, Japanese.
Esteban Abad, 25, is a Spanish young man employed by a well-known multinational banking corporation with offices in New York. He has been taking a course in Portuguese for the last two months, and he has his own ideas on the subject. According to Abad, "most large multinationals will soon be covering the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) as one business unit, with the headquarters normally in Madrid, Barcelona or Lisbon. It therefore makes sense to be able to cover the whole area linguistically. Similarly, given the fact that I am a Spanish and English speaker, I cover the nearly totality of America language wise. A career in emerging markets-related activity, and in particular covering Latin America is always a possibility. The biggest economy in Latin America by far is that of Brazil, which is a Portuguese-speaking country. Learning that language will , therefore, allow me to cover the whole area."
Mario diPreta, an Italian-American employee of a large banking corporation who has also been taking a course in Portuguese, shares the same ideas. He also adds that Brazil is not only the biggest emerging market in Latin America, and that Brazilian businesspeople are much more involved with Wall Street deals and international trade (even more than the Mexicans are), so it is an advantage to be able to communicate with them in their native language, even though most of them are quite fluent in English.
Esteban Abad also has other reasons: "A lot of people learn languages these days. Speaking three languages is good, but that no longer provides one with the edge it would have done, say, ten years ago. Learning a fourth language shows my commitment to develop myself and to become more marketable. A key reason why I have chosen Portuguese over other languages is the fact that it shares the same Latin root with Spanish, making it far easier to learn than, for example, German or Russian."
I asked both Mr. Abad and Mr. DiPreta (who were interviewed separately) if either of them had been pressed into the task of learning Portuguese by their respective employers. Both stated that the drive to learn it came from their own personal and professional needs and interests and not from internal pressures from their corporations.
Portuguese teachers can't complain. After all, the once exotic foreign language that few were interested in is now a hot commodity, and those teaching it are busier than ever, and many are having trouble juggling their hours to accommodate the ever-growing number of students. Large corporations are conducting in-house Portuguese language training to their employees, and individual students are constantly registering in the many language centers in the New York-New Jersey area.
In the past, Americans looked for Portuguese as an advantage in their tropical romantic conquests during the country's famous Carnaval holidays. Today, those students mean business—serious business.
Brazil has been growing a lot economically since its government opened its markets to new, foreign investors in the early nineties. Back then, international investors were skeptical of the potential of the then slow-developing country. After Brazil proved that it could become politically and somewhat economically stable (despite of the inaccurate, overblown recent pessimistic predictions), investors started pouring in, and the country's positive cash flow also caused local investors to make their bets overseas instead of just hiding funds into numbered accounts in Switzerland.
It is a happy time for Brazil and its "endangered" language.
Ernest Barteldes, the author, was born in Michigan USA and has been a teacher of English in Brazil for over ten years. He is a graduate from Ceará State University and recently married a Brazilian. Barteldes has been a regular columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette in New York City and has also collaborated to a number of magazines and newspapers in the US and in Brazil. He can be contacted at ebarteldes@yahoo.com