Portuguese is the official language of the Democratic Republic of East Timor, alongside Tetun Prasa (an Austronesian language and local lingua franca). In this work, I carry out a study of the Portuguese spoken in East Timor in order to verify whether it is possible to recognize a variety of Portuguese in formation. Other objectives include its documentation and description of its most notable linguistic aspects, as well as to develop actions to value it inside and outside East Timorese society in latter moments of the investigation. In order to achieve the objectives, I use Ecolinguistic theory and its different methods of analysis, which cover linguistic and extralinguistic topics, so that it is possible to describe accurately the Portuguese language in Timor, approaching several aspects of the researched object. It is emphasized here that a position of preserving the (possible) variety of the Portuguese language spoken in East Timor is also an ecological stance since it is aiming to maintain the linguistic diversity of the Portuguese language in the world.

Keywords: East Timor Portuguese, Ecolinguistics, Languages in contact, Non-dominant variety, Pluricentric language, Portuguese language, Timor Island.

Language(s) dealt with: East Timor Portuguese, Portuguese

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Details

published by PCL-PRESS (Graz)

April 18, 2024 | 300 pages | ISBN 9789403736181