Padrão de Resposta

The speech of the language
The modern techniques of genetic mapping have made it possible to quantify what can be seen by everyone. While in the United States only 1% of the white population has some African ancestry, in Brazil the majority of whites – around 60% – belongs to African or Native American lines in the matter of maternal ancestry. The genetic intertwinement is noticeable in the way how Brazilians self-classify themselves when they are prompted to declare the color of their skin : from ‘galega’ to ‘sarará’ and from ‘half-black’ to ‘olive’ and ‘closer to white’, the chromatic lexicon spreads out as a vast and anarchic web of designations.
A people’s language is not only a communication tool in daily life : it incorporates symbolic and figurative elements and conveys inherently a specific way of thinking and feeling. There is a form of life built in in our spoken language – the language speaks. That is why, while the presence of African-Indian terms and idioms in American English is rare (even though it is not inexistent), it is ubiquitously seen in Brazilian Portuguese. The porosity of * Portuguese-Brazilian culture to cultures stemming from African or Native American roots results in our common speech, and, as the anthropologist from Bahia Antonio Risério demonstrates with an abundance of findings and examples, the areas having the most linguistic influence are precisely those in which the African-Indian presence has become a part of our culture’s DNA : the erotic-affective ; the morals and the habits ; the cuisine ; music and dance, besides, of course, the vast realm of terms concerning flora, fauna and geography, in which the presence of ‘tupi’² is prominent. The mixing of the languages of the ‘language-maker’ people is the mixing of genes by other means. ‘What does this language want ? What can it do ?’.