The thesis Instrumentos Musicais nas Línguas Bantu e Herança no Português do Brasil, authored by Alzenir Mendes Martins de Menezes and published by LOT (Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics) in 2024, explores the vocabulary of musical instruments in Bantu languages and its linguistic legacy in Brazilian Portuguese. The study describes, compares, and analyzes reflexes of 5,700 lexical items identified through an extensive literature review. Data collection was primarily conducted at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, drawing on its specialized collections of musical instruments and relevant literature. This research was further supplemented by cross-references with key musicological sources.

När språkutbildningar ifrågasätts är det dags att påminna om språkets roll i vetenskap, kultur och demokrati. Laura Álvarez López och Stefan Helgesson vid humanistiska fakulteten vid Stockholms universitet argumenterar för varför språken ska ha en självklar plats i universitetens framtid.

Divided into two sections, this chapter presents Lusophone Africa as a multilingual region and offers an overview centered on recent sociolinguistic studies with a focus on Portuguese, including the widely spoken Portuguese-lexified creoles of Africa. The first section includes a brief literature review consisting primarily of studies about language contact, variation and bi-/multilingualism from a sociohistorical perspective with an emphasis on Portuguese-lexified creoles and African varieties of Portuguese. The second section focuses on recurring topics in Applied African Sociolinguistics during the last decade, mainly related to language and power and frequently applied to language-in-education and general language policies. The final remarks point out selected topics that merit further study.

The number of Swedish citizens who migrated to Brazil between 1881 and 1914 reached between 3,000 and 5,000. Most were labourers or peasants, hoping to find a better life in a new country. Although it did not compare to the sheer size of the migration flows to North America, it still received some attention in the Swedish press. Newspapers often presented Brazil as an exotic destination, but there were those who doubted whether it was appropriate for Swedes to emigrate to Brazil.

This article draws on Swedish migrants’ letters and diaries, written and published either while the writers were living in Brazil or, sometimes, after they had returned to Sweden. The narratives constructed an image of Brazil as a contact zone between cultures, and are best understood as a discourse and social practice in which the individual journeys played out. The texts provide insights into people’s experiences of the kind we focus on in our analysis: daily life and observations about nature, the environment, and living conditions as well as other peoples.

There are not only extensive sources for how Swedish migrants reportedtheir attempts to ensure the success of their migration projects in the European settler colonies in southern Brazil, but they are also sufficiently broad and varied to provide a good overview, while the existence of several series of letters by the same writers makes it possible to follow individual migration projects. The article explores the contradictions between migrants’ stories, the evolution of individual Swedes’ views on life in Brazil, and how their known ideas about colonisation, nationalism, racism, and power related to the contact zone between Brazilian and Swedish society and history.

By analysing the texts from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering both the Swedish and Brazilian contexts, we map Swedes’ migration projects and contribute to the discussion of settler migration and its social and cultural implications. We find the Swedish migrants’ discourse to have been heavily impacted by processes at a level that individuals rarely influence. Yet at the same time, their writings reflected the pragmatic realities of life as a migrant. We would argue that most Swedish migrants who wanted to defend their decision to emigrate (and perhaps never return) chose to present it in the best possible light, whereas those who wanted to return and become part of the Swedish community again adapted their descriptions accordingly, offering a negative picture of life in their new country and often of their own emigration projects.

Mellan 1881 och 1914 beräknas mellan 3 000 och 5 000 svenskar ha migrerat tillBrasilien. Trots att det inte handlade om någon massutvandring i jämförelse medutvandringen till Nordamerika fick denna migration stor uppmärksamhet i densamtida svenska pressen. Brasilien framstod som ett exotiskt resmål men emigrationendit hamnade också i en relativt livlig debatt som handlade om det överhuvudtagetvar lämpligt för svenskar att bosätta sig i Brasilien. Denna studie byggerfrämst på publicerade brev och dagboksanteckningar från svenskar som emigrerattill Brasilien och hur de i dessa texter framställt sina migrationsprojekt i det nyalandet.

O dossiê temático Contato, Aquisição e Mudança reúne trabalhos que abordam situações de contato linguístico, correlacionando-as a processos de aquisição (L1 ou L2) e/ou mudança. Os estudos publicados focalizam fatos em diferentes níveis de análise (lexical, morfo-fonológico, sintático, semântico, discursivo), sob diferentes escopos teóricos. A coletânea se integra ao conjunto de homenagens às Profas. Charlotte Galves e Mary Kato, na esteira do V CILH (Congresso Internacional de Linguística Histórica), realizado pelo Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem da UNICAMP entre os dias 19 e 23 de julho de 2021. 

O dossiê temático Contato, Aquisição e Mudança reúne trabalhos que abordam situações de contato linguístico, correlacionando-as a processos de aquisição (L1 ou L2) e/ou mudança. Os estudos publicados focalizam fatos em diferentes níveis de análise (lexical, morfo-fonológico, sintático, semântico, discursivo), sob diferentes escopos teóricos. A coletânea se integra ao conjunto de homenagens às Profas. Charlotte Galves e Mary Kato, na esteira do V CILH (Congresso Internacional de Linguística Histórica), realizado pelo Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem da UNICAMP entre os dias 19 e 23 de julho de 2021.

Em 2019, as professoras e pesquisadoras Vanessa Meireles, daUniversidade Paul Valéry, e Marcia dos Santos Machado Vieira, da UniversidadeFederal do Rio de Janeiro, deram início ao projeto internacional VariaR –Variação em Línguas Românicas, do qual surge a presente coletânea que exploraum conjunto de variedades de português. O grupo de pesquisa, que já organizoucolóquios e seminários internacionais, tem como objetivo principal incentivar acolaboração entre pesquisadores que têm em comum o objetivo de estudar avariação e mudança na língua portuguesa e contribuir para a descrição e aanálise de fenômenos variáveis no plano fonético-fonológico e morfossintático,inclusive a comparação do português com outras línguas românicas.