Pretoguês: About A Brasil That Never Spoke With One Voice

Brazil has always been multilingual. This is an inconvenient fact—too fragmented, too alive, too resistant—for the tidy story the nation prefers to tell about itself. For more than a century, Brazil has performed the role of a monolingual country on the world stage, exporting a sleek linguistic unity that makes the country legible to global powers and palatable to its elites. But that unity is a fiction. And like all fictions of nationhood, it was engineered.

Before Portuguese ever washed onto the Atlantic coast, more than a thousand Indigenous languages structured life, shaped cosmologies, and organized trade networks across what would later be called Brazil. By the time the 20th century arrived, fewer than 200 survived. This collapse wasn’t accidental: it was policy. As sociologist Vânia Penha-Lopes reminds us, the myth of linguistic homogeneity was never a benign misunderstanding—it was a political project.

Language, in Brazil, was a weapon disguised as a schoolbook. Colonial authorities understood that whoever names the world controls it. The forced spread of Portuguese wasn’t just a tool of communication; it was a system of domination. To unify the language, they first had to unify the imaginary: erase memories, suppress competing vocabularies of belonging, and narrow the spectrum of possible identities to those that benefited the colonial order.

The violence wasn’t only Indigenous. Enslaved Africans—ripped from dozens of linguistic worlds—created Afro-Brazilian speech communities that reorganized rhythm, syntax, and worldview. Their influence on Brazilian Portuguese is not ornamental; it is foundational. Yet official history treated African languages as noise contaminating a European melody. What survived, survived in spite of the state, not because of it.

Even after independence, Brazil doubled down on monolingualism. In the early Republic, the idea of a singular “língua nacional” became a shortcut to manufacturing nationhood—especially in a country uncomfortable with its own diversity. Schools punished Indigenous children for speaking their languages. Municipalities banned Afro-Brazilian speech forms. Regional dialects were mocked as signs of backwardness. The message was clear: unity meant obedience.

But the linguistic reality never complied. Brazilian Portuguese is anything but pure. It is a palimpsest: Tupi verbs hiding inside everyday slang, Kimbundu and Yoruba pulsing in cadence and intonation, regional reinventions from Pará to Pernambuco reshaping grammar through lived experience. 

As Lélia Gonzalez wrote, Brazil doesn’t speak Portuguese; it speaks pretoguês—an Amerindian-Afro-Latin language disguised under a European name.

What’s striking today is how loudly this erased history is resurfacing. As Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian movements gain visibility, the country is forced to confront the illusion it was raised on. Linguistic diversity isn’t a threat to unity; it is evidence that Brazil’s identity was always bigger than its borders, more plural than its politics, and more resistant than the forces that tried to discipline it.

The real debate isn’t about grammar. It’s about power. Who gets to define what counts as Brazilian? Whose voice is allowed to sound “correct”? And why do the descendants of those once silenced still have to prove their belonging?

Brazil was never monolingual. It was made monolingual.
And as the country begins to acknowledge this, a different truth emerges:
the language didn’t die—it hid, it transformed, it fought back.
Because Brazil’s tongue was never born pure.
It was born alive.