Sprachmischung: echoes of interdiction and identity marks

Abstract

We search for, by the historical events of 1930/1940 in Brazil, to comprehend how linguistic nationalization politics of the Getúlio Vargas government interfered with social practices of German immigrants regarding the language. For this purpose, we analyze measures/decrees of Vargas’ government and show how the official interdiction brought consequences to the immigrants’ lives. Despite the effort/the legal implementation of the State, the immigrant's native language survived the prohibition and remained alive at social practices in private-familiar spaces in some communities: Sprachmischung. Our discursive corpus is composed of reports of German immigrants' children from the northwest region of Rio Grande do Sul, who grow, in their social imagination, elements of connection with their ancestors. Therefore, according to the discursive analysis of the corpus, we realize the connection between the people with the Sprachmischung and the way voices resound, and echo, speeches, and memories crossed by the interdiction of the person by the language. For this purpose, we embrace the Analysis of the Speech, mobilizing the concept of language on its linguistic materiality, affected, and determined by ideological and political historical elements.