Brazil

Abstract

This chapter first provides an overview of the people and languages that have intersected in the process of formation of Brazilian Portuguese (section 1), which resulted in a multi- and plurilingual landscape, and its subsequent erasure (section 2). Section 3 retrieves the path of the research agenda that has been gathered to support the profiling of Brazilian Portuguese and that reverberates in theoretical hypotheses for its explanation, such as creolistic (section 3.1), drift (section 3.2), and pluricentrism (section 3.3). Finally, considering the path taken, a proposal for a new periodization of Brazilian Portuguese is outlined, considering the educational milestones and the new migratory flows, which allow characterizing Brazilian Portuguese as a pluricentric language in a non-dominant context.