1987- 1991

Silvana Serrani

In this project I studied how the phenomenon of mass immigration during the period of national organization in the southern cone of Latin America (19th century fin de siecle0 was represented in discourse. I studied the representation of language (Spanish and pidgin forms common at the time) in polemic essays published in the main Buenos Aires newspapers at the time. Because of the magnitude of European immigration to Latin America Southern Cone countries, the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro considers these societies as constituted by transplanted peoples. The aim of the research was to to understand the functioning of social contradictions concerning language during the founding of Argentina as a nation, and to consider the possible consequences regarding social identity.
The corpus had a core formed by the main polemic journalistic essays on language matters, published in 1900 and 1902. Intertextuality and interdiscursivity of texts produced several decades before and afterwards also were considered. And one of the analytical categories was discursive resonance, or, paraphrasing devices in discourse.
The results of our analysis showed three types of language and identity representations by the oligarchic discursive formation in Argentina.
We called the first type: aristocratic castillan. In the texts produced in this type of discourse it is not admitted explicitly that there is a problem about language. When describing the language spoken in Buenos Aires at that time, the foreign voices and transformations in Buenos Aires Spanish are very rarely considered. When compelled to mention those facts, the representation is done by statements of surprise or even indignation.
Between the first and the second type there is an intrinsic contradiction relationship (Foucault, 1969). The object of discourse "language" is represented differently at the utterance level but a semantic equivalence concerning linguistic purism is maintained.
We called the second type of enunciation mode: academic castillan. In this case the discourse is built on an explicit interest in the language purity and the procedures are similar to the descriptions of the natural sciences, in formation at that time. The expression; "Our language" appears in the essays always counterpoised by the "corruptions", against which every "good" citizen would be "obliged" to fight.
The third type, we called: tolerant paternalism, is with the other two in a relationship of derived contradiction, (following Foucault's conception of contradiction). In this third way of representing language, foreign voices are neither excluded nor stigmatized as corruptions supposed to be eliminated. It is proposed, instead, as a sort of "integration". But this process is understood as a process of a dominant acculturation in which the native languages and cultures of foreigners are discriminated.

Serrani, Silvana (1993, 2nd. ed. 1997) A Linguagem na Pesquisa Sociocultural. ISBN 85-268-0253-4. Campinas, Ed. Da Unicamp, 152 p.

Serrani, Silvana (1992) Serrani, Silvana (1992) "La Lengua como Metáfora de la Nación”, Revista Signo y Seña 1. Signo y seña – ISSN: 0327-8956 Buenos Aires, Argentina pp. 29-51.

Serrani, Silvana (1993) "Ressonâncias Fundadoras e Imaginário de Língua" in E. Orlandi (Ed.), Discurso Fundador. A Formação do País e a Construção da Identidade Nacional. ISBN 85-7113-078-7Campinas: Pontes, pp. 113-126.