The representation of immigrants and their representation of linguistic education in the press from Santa Catarina: a historiographic study

Abstract

This article explains the representation of linguistic education of immigrants in Brazil. The theoretical framework of the study is based on Linguistic Historiography (LH), which addresses the reconstruction of knowledge about languages and human language in different periods of time. This is a documentary type study, with a corpus consisting of journalistic narratives published between 1900 to 2015, in the Santa Catarina press. The newspapers chosen as sources for the document corpus were: O Estado and Diário Catarinense. For the data processing, the technique of content analysis. The results were analyzed in three distinct sections. The first section focuses on the First Nationalization Campaign period, in which we discuss the representation of immigrants: useful worker or undesirable element, and the representation of linguistic education: nationalizing schools for the assimilation of immigrants. The second section focuses on the Second Nationalization Campaign. The categories discussed in this section are the representation of immigrants: theundesirable element and the representation of linguistic education; and monocultural and monolingual practices in nationalizing schools. The third section refers to the period after the two world wars, characterized as the period from dictatorship to redemocratization. The categories addressed in this section are immigrant representation; as useful worker and immigrant from poor countries, and also the representation of linguistic education: bilingualism in school and out of school. The results indicate the legislative policies of recent years have overcome a past that was silenced through coercive policies, replacing it with a context marked by a certain tolerance and protection of the linguistic and cultural diversity that exist in the country.