Paper short abstract:

We will consider some of the ways Brazilian indigenous peoples are using internet-based social media, focusing on their public profiles and native proper names displayed as diacritical features. We will took this process of self-nomination as a recent ethnolinguistical political commitment example.

Paper long abstract:

Considering Northeast, one of the oldest Brazilian regions where Portuguese colonization took place since the 16th century, we propose to think about contemporary process which are being called, by some indigenous peoples, "ancestral language revival". For the antiquity of European contact in the region and its colonial oppression and violence, most of Northeastern indigenous peoples lost competence in their native languages, speaking Portuguese as first language since then. Although, we observe a recent enterprise by these peoples aiming to revival their linguistic systems, both by building a lexicon from the old people's memories and also by drawing educational projects seeking indigenous school learning.

Then, we will present a contemporary phenomenon observed on social media and indigenous users' public profiles, by which they begin to assume their native proper names rather than their Brazilian ones - native names that they already bear in other contexts like universities, where many of them increasingly study and also teach. We will try to understand how this recent changing could be a display of larger societal projects of language revival, besides a reinforcement of ethnic and community commitments, in local and intra-ethnic as well as national, inter- and extra-ethnic levels. Valorization of native languages in contexts as Brazilian Northeast region, where many of these idioms are no longer commonly spoken, seems to point out a new step to Brazilian indigenous movement, one which takes language as a diacritical feature and public profiles' nomination as mark of difference and ethnicity.