Spanish in Brazil: Language Policy, Business, and Cultural Propaganda

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the policies designed and implemented since the early nineties by Spanish government agencies in order to promote Spanish as a valuable international language. In particular, we focus on its promotion in Brazil and on the strategies used to legitimize not only the presence of the language in various domains (e.g. the educational system) but also the active participation of Spanish institutions in its spread. Through a detailed analysis of a corpus of relevant texts, (a) we critically examine the cultural, economic, and political roots of these policies, as well as the rhetoric used to provide them with legitimacy; (b) we explore their connection to national language and global language ideologies; and (c), on the basis of our findings and related work done by other scholars, we argue for the need to develop a comparative strand in the analysis of the international promotion of languages.