LANGUAGE POLICY AND PORTUGUESE TEACHING IN TIMOR-LESTE: WHAT WRITTEN TEXTS REVEAL

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.929372313113

• Palavras-chave: Português de Timor-Leste, Contato Linguístico, Política Linguística.

• Keywords: Timor-Leste Portuguese, Language Contact, Language Policy.

• Abstract:

  Timor-Leste is a multilingual country, in which the penetration of Portuguese and Portuguese-based creoles in the 20th century was temporarily interrupted. Since its independence, however, the revival of Portuguese has been present on the island, which has been established as the official language. (HULL, 2001; ALBUQUERQUE, 2011; MARTINS, 2016) As a result of a linguistic policy aimed at the country's development, the Timorese have learned and used Portuguese, understood as a language of international relevance, especially in official and academic contexts. Cooperation agreements with Brazil and Portugal, over the last two decades, have boosted the role of Portuguese as L2/FL in Timor. This work provides a general overview of the situation of Portuguese in Timor-Leste and presents how the Portuguese grammatical system is difficult to understand for the Timorese, which raises the discussion about how learning Portuguese takes place in this multilingual context and how this variety of Portuguese has developed. (OLIVEIRA JUNIOR, 2021) From the perspective of learning Portuguese, I assume partial access to Universal Grammar (UG), according to the Principles and Parameters model. (CHOMSKY, 1981) In this context, texts written by Timorese who completed basic education contain constructions with verbs in infinite form, which highlights different stages in the acquisition of the Null Subject Parameter marking and the inflectional paradigm of verbs.