The Linguistic Thought of Antenor Nascentes (1886–1972) and the Luso-Brazilian glotophoby: an historiographic analysis

Abstract

This article revisits a set of reflections first presented in the paper From the Brasílica Language to the Brazilian Language: A Romance Language in the Making? A Debate on Glotophobia and Linguistic Prejudice from the Perspective of Historical Linguistics, delivered in the session Literature and Representations at the event Abralin em Cena 18 – Languages, Race, Gender, and Intersectionality in the Struggle for Rights, held at the Darcy Ribeiro campus of the University of Brasília (UnB) in August 2025 and organized by the Brazilian Linguistics Association (ABRALIN). The reflections developed here relate broadly to the project Anchietan Studies in the 21st Century and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (UNESCO, 2022–2032): Interfaces between Politics and Linguistic Historiography, carried out within the Graduate Program in Language Studies at the Fluminense Federal University and funded by the Rio de Janeiro State Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) through the Cientista Nosso Estado (CNE) grant. Building on discussions initiated during the event, we bring into the contemporary debate the issue of discrimination on linguistic grounds—glotophobia (Blanchet, 2016)—currently experienced by the Brazilian community in Portugal. To this debate, we add a historical perspective through an early 20th-century work on the topic: O Linguajar Carioca by Antenor Nascentes (1922 [2023]). We adopt Linguistic Historiography as our theoretical framework for interpreting Nascentes’ work, with the aim of developing a method for analyzing and interpreting the author’s linguistic thought regarding glotophobia as documented in his text. As a result of this rereading, we present a historiographic understanding of the phenomenon of glotophobia in the Luso-Brazilian context of Nascentes’ time—the 1920s—which may allow us, by contrast, to better comprehend the present situation in Brazil–Portugal relations concerning the varieties of the Portuguese language.