too close for comfort: about Portunhol

[gusl]

I sometimes feel uncomfortable when people speak Portunhol to me... because I feel unsure of how much of the linguistic gap I should try to cross. I know I can't speak proper Spanish, but isn't it only polite to try to speak their language, just as they're trying to speak mine? Of course, if I do, this dynamic can lead them to interpret my usage of Spanish words as meaning that the Portuguese word is the same, even when that is not the case. But it looks like most people are more easygoing than me when it comes to this.

Funny enough, the idea of discomfort appears in the title of an interesting paper about Portunhol:
Lipski, John M. (2006). Too close for comfort? the genesis of "portuñol/portunhol":

<< Of all the Ibero-Romance languages, only the Spanish-Portuguese dyad has produced (1) a cluster of bilingual contact dialects and crossover phenomena; (2) a widespread belief that cross-language communication can easily be effected by “faking” an approximation to the non-native language without actually having learned it, (3) a polyvalent term (portuñol/portunhol) used to describe a wide range of phenomena, including spontaneous contact vernaculars in border regions, errors produced by speakers attempting to speak the L2 correctly, and idiosyncratic invented speech designed to facilitate communication between the two languages; (4) an emergent literature (in published form and increasingly on the Internet), including implicit efforts at standardizing portuñol/portunhol usage. The range of events that fall under the rubric of portuñol therefore lie at the heart of language-acquisition research >>

OMG, a standard for Portunhol??

Comments

[amatorculus.livejournal.com]

Thanks--you just sent me on a journey through wikipedia where I went from contact linguistics to the influence of African culture in Brazil. I'd better go do some actual work now.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

hi, so how did you happen upon this journal?

[amatorculus.livejournal.com]

via ashliana!