O ESTATUTO E AS CRENÇAS DE ESTUDANTES DO PEC-G EM RELAÇÃO À LINGUA PORTUGUESA: “O PORTUGUÊS É MUITO IMPORTANTE”

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the status and the beliefs of participants of the Exchange Program for Undergraduate Students (PEC-G) relating to the Portuguese language. These participants come from four countries whose official language is Portuguese – Cape Green, Guinea Bissau, San-Tome and Principe, and East Timor. We made use of the corpus of the Project Speech and Discourse Processing: analysis and applications (PROFALA) and we focused on the answers given to the question related to the relevance of the Portuguese language to these participants. The multidimensional view of language policy by Spolsky (2004, 2009, 2012) is our theoretical foundation. In the qualitative analysis of the data, we highlighted that Portuguese is positively evaluated by the students for being the official language; for being an integration link and a communication tool between different groups within their home countries and between countries where Portuguese is an official language; for being a work language in their own countries; and for being a first language to some participants.