Racial and linguistic prejudice in Brazil: comparisons, contrasts and anthropophagic solutions

In this article we highlight how linguistic prejudice and discrimination towards non-standard varieties of a language can have real life effects not only on individuals but on the social and economic progress of countries. We argue that such is the case with the popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, especially in educational contexts. We analyse the most common educational measure to deal with language variation in a non-discriminatory way: the theory of differences and the proposal of bidialectalism. We argue that these measures are ineffectual since they are based on naïve conclusions of sociolinguistic studies which propose that linguistic prejudice can be combatted via a ‘principle of error correction’ (LEWIS, 2018)whereby the focus is on changing beliefs of individuals. We argue that it is more important to analyse the political, historical and social factors which sustain and reinforce such beliefs and the material structures which endorse and promote them. We therefore examine linguistic prejudice within the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1973, 1977, 1986, 1991) and define it as a form of symbolic violence. We maintain that conceiving linguistic prejudice and discrimination in this way (a) makes it clear that linguistic prejudice is intimately related to other prejudices and (b) it offers new insights on how to combat this type of prejudice and discrimination more effectively.