Paper short abstract:

Ongoing normalization efforts for Mozambican Portuguese, foreseeably cementing its status as an emerging national standard, pose hard policy choices for linguists. The needed legitimization of words of Bantu origin demands technical spelling options which will shape much more than mere orthography.

Paper long abstract:

Over recent decades, numerous studies have shown there is a steady national variety of Portuguese in Mozambique (MP) which increasingly acts as the de facto spoken standard in the country. This reality is unmatched at the language planning and linguistic policy realms, though, where European Portuguese retains its status as the educational, political and social media variety of preference.

Several factors contribute to this: the inertia of the sociolinguistic perceptions of varieties' asymmetrical prestige by political actors, the lack of endogenous publishing and linguistic normalization resources, and an ever-lasting debate over the legitimacy of assuming Portuguese as an endogenous language of Mozambique, even if today it is most widely spoken throughout the country. One of the first barrier for such policy changes to take place, though, lies in the non-existence of a writing tradition, leading to a perceived lack of legitimacy of the variety's numerous lexical borrowings from the Bantu languages with which PM is in contact.

This presentation will contextualize and describe ongoing efforts towards the creation of linguistic normalization resources for MP, focusing on the current discussion over the definition of spelling rules for lexical borrowings resulting from language contact with other Mozambican languages. It will discuss whether and how such words should be adapted to Portuguese spelling and the perceived result of such a policy in the multilingual and contact-ridden linguistic landscape of Mozambique. Different perspectives (Bantu language speakers, linguists and society at large) will be weighed, assessing the technical normalization issues resulting from the choices taking place.