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English Is Spoken Here . . . Too Much, Some Say

By LARRY ROHTER / Published: May 15, 2001

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If Aldo Rebelo gets his way, it will soon be illegal for Brazilians to go to a ''drive-in'' for a ''hot dog'' and ''milkshake,'' entrust their cars to ''valet parking'' or invest their money with a ''personal banker.''

The activities themselves will not be prohibited, mind you, just the use of the English-language terms by which they are commonly known here.

Mr. Rebelo, a member of Congress, decided to take action after he took offense at the proliferation here of stores with English-language names, like The Pet From Ipanema; Love, Sex and Money, a boutique; World Top Lock; Fashion Mall; Bad Kid; Video Market; and Sweet Way.

Mr. Aldo Rebelo

''Why should Brazilians have to feel embarrassed in their own country because they can't pronounce these names?'' said Mr. Rebelo, a member of the Communist Party of Brazil.

In a burst of what opponents disparagingly call ''verbal nationalism,'' Mr. Rebelo is sponsoring legislation that would outlaw the introduction and use of foreign words in this nation of 170 million people. It was initially considered little more than a crank bill.

The goal of his bill, he said, is ''to boost the self-esteem of the people in relation to Portuguese and show them that it is not a language that is ugly, underdeveloped, backward or useless, as some people might imagine.''

Mr. Rebelo said he was particularly alarmed by the use of English-language terms in business and technology when ''there are perfectly adequate Portuguese-language substitutes.''

Brazil has the largest computer and Internet industry in Latin America, and English-derived verbs like startar, printar, attachar or deletear and the nouns homepage, e-mail, site and mouse are standard usage.

''I think he and the whole idea are nuts,'' retorted Ricardo Gouveia Botelho, a 28-year-old Web site designer shopping at a computer store. ''We use those words because everybody in the world understands them. And what does he plan to do, send the language police to the office to bust us?''

But the proposal was approved by the lower house of Congress on March 29, and business and advertising groups are lobbying intensely to defeat it in the Senate.

The lower house passed the bill in an atmosphere of wanting to distract attention from a growing political corruption scandal, and it is not known when the Senate will get around to dealing with it. If the Senate passes the bill, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso will have to decide whether to sign it.

Though French and Arabic have historically been the main sources of foreign words used in Portuguese, the language of Brazil, the initiative is clearly aimed at English, which Mr. Rebelo said he regarded as an instrument of ''the economic and commercial hegemony of the United States.''

Businesses have already begun reacting as though they expect his bill to become law. Major banks have ended programs with names like Hot Money, Federal Card and Home Banking, while stores have begun taking down signs that advertise a ''sale'' or ''20 percent off'' and replacing them with others announcing a ''liquidação.''

In a show of support for Mr. Rebelo, posters listing Portuguese-language substitutes for English words have gone up over this cosmopolitan city, which sets styles for the rest of the country. They were put up by the Movement for the Valuation of Brazilian Culture, Language and Riches, a nationalist group.

But most language professionals maintain that the legislation is too extreme and that it underestimates the absorptive capacity of Brazilian Portuguese.

Brazilians have proven so creative in adapting English to their own needs, in fact, that native speakers of English are often baffled by the usages they encounter here. To Brazilians a shower stall is a ''box,'' a billboard is an ''outdoors,'' to go jogging is to ''cooper'' (after a doctor who introduced it here), a razor blade is a ''gilete'' and the steroid-fueled weight lifters who pick fights in nightclubs are ''pit boys.''

Taken literally, the measure would also appear to outlaw much of the vocabulary of soccer, the national sport, starting with the name of the game itself, futebol, and including such terms as gol and pênalti. But Mr. Rebelo said he was willing to grant an exception for words that had already been or were being assimilated into Portuguese.

''We don't want to control the evolution of the language,'' he said. ''What we want is to avoid abuses.'' And the best way to do that, he contends, is to punish violators with fines or by ''sending them back to school for Portuguese classes.''

The legislation calls for the Brazilian Academy of Letters to determine which foreign words can be used legally, or as Mr. Rebelo puts it, ''granted a residence visa,'' and which cannot. But the academy, which already sets the rules for spelling here, seems to have reservations about the expanded role envisioned for it.

''The congressman's concern for the health of our language is praiseworthy,'' said Tarcísio Padilha, president of the 40-member group. ''But this problem is a cultural one of great complexity, and it seems to me to be more a matter for public debate than one which should be regulated by laws and decrees.''

Sérgio Nogueira Duarte, a professor of Portuguese who writes a weekly column on language for the daily Jornal do Brasil, said: ''Foreign words are present in any language, and often for good reasons. To use the word 'dumping,' for example, is better than wasting a whole line to explain in Portuguese that you are talking about selling a product below cost so as to damage a competitor.''

One reason Mr. Rebelo's proposal may be flourishing is Brazil's status as the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere, which feeds a sense of isolation and fear that the language will be overwhelmed by others.

The drive to protect Portuguese is not the only such movement. France has passed numerous laws in the last decade to try to protect the French language; in fact, Mr. Rebelo said his measure was modeled on those. Quebec also has passed laws to assure the supremacy of French.

Portuguese may be the seventh most widely spoken language in the world, but outside Brazil it is the mother tongue of fewer than 50 million people, the bulk of whom live in five very poor countries in Africa -- Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe.

As a result, there was a flurry of concern last year when Steven R. Fischer, an American linguist, predicted that ''within 300 years Brazil will be speaking'' a different language.

That forecast came on the heels of a government decision to make the study of Spanish obligatory in Brazilian schools to help forge closer ties with the rest of Latin America, which often dismisses Portuguese as nothing more than ''Spanish, badly spoken.''

''Brazil is surrounded by countries that speak Spanish,'' Dr. Fischer said in an interview with the newsmagazine Veja. ''As commercial exchanges and contacts increase,'' he said, ''there will be much pressure'' to abandon Portuguese.

''Due to the enormous influence of Spanish, it is quite likely that a type of Portunhol will emerge,'' he added, combining the Portuguese words for Portuguese and Spanish.

In an effort to fortify the language internationally, Brazil has stepped up its financial support for the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Nations, created in 1996.

The Brazilian government has also pushed for Portuguese to be used as an official language at the United Nations and taken the lead in trying to revive the use of Portuguese in East Timor, where use of the language was harshly restricted during 25 years of Indonesian rule.

But Brazilians should not ''feel threatened or go tilting at windmills on some sort of Don Quixote quest that doesn't make sense,'' Dr. Padilha counseled. ''Any language is a living organism that is evolving, and our language, thank God, is one that has always shown a capacity to accept the foreign words it wants and to reject the ones that it doesn't want.''