Racializing Eulalia's language: reviewing concepts from the Global South

Abstract

This article aimed to produce considerations about the book "A Língua de Eulália: novela sociolinguística", by Marcos Bagno (2006), with regard to the analytical categories of Language and Race. Almost three decades after the publication of this book, it is necessary to reflect on the non-use of the category Race as an element to describe the character Eulália. To do this, we used as theoretical reference authors such as Gonzalez (1988), Makoni and Meinhof (2006) and Nascimento (2019, 2022), as well as the Raciolinguistic perspective of Rosa and Flores (2017). The methodological characteristics of this study refer to a qualitative approach of a bibliographical nature, used to analyze the aforementioned work. From this perspective, some general conclusions show that racializing Eulália's Language: a sociolinguistic novel, inserting the category Race into the focus of the discussion in relation to the category Language, from the epistemological perspectives of the Global South, could lead to the construction of meanings about the linguistic productions of the character Eulália, in which she could be recognized as a speaker of "pretoguês" (Gonzalez, 1988), which we argue are uses of varieties of Portuguese spoken by black people in Brazil, resulting from traces of history marked by the enslavement of African peoples.