Vernacular languages and cultural identity in Portuguese-speaking Mozambican Literature: the meeting of voices between Paulina Chiziane and Mia Couto

Abstract

Some Mozambican novels, written in Portuguese, bring with them a vocabulary of Mozambican vernacular languages, developed in the novel and translated in a final wordlist.  The wordlist highlights the background that these Mozambican languages lend to Portuguese in communication, despite their “marginalization” in this country where official communication is reserved for standard Portuguese language, and it is part of what makes Mozambican this literature of Portuguese language. Despite its rich linguistic and literary content, the study of the wordlist, as part of the novel, has not yet attracted the attention of Mozambique’s literary and linguistic critics. It is necessary to understand the lexical field used and the communication situations in which these languages are used in that literature, if there are some Mozambican sociocultural realities that the Portuguese language does not effectively transmit, making the use of vernacular languages impera-tive. This work is based on these question  and its corpus is the wordlist of the novels Ventos do apocalipse by Paulina Chiziane and O outro pé da sereia by Mia Couto. It is bibliographical research as conceived by Fonseca (2002) whose analysis uses some theories, such as Charaudeau (2002) on the relationship between cultural identity, language and discourse.