Beto Vianna
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Aracaju, Brazil

Xoco identity and ethnogenesis in the context of Brazilian Portuguese

Key words: Xoco people, Brazilian Portuguese, identity, ethnogenesis

The Xoco people are an indigenous group living in a community of 400 people in the city of Porto da Folha, state of Sergipe, Brazil. As it happens to some other Brazilian indigenous groups, the Xoco adopted a non-dominant variety of the country´s major pluricentric language, Brazilian Portuguese, as their mother tongue, used in their everyday personal and institutional interactions.

Literature on the Xoco is concentrated mainly in the area of Cultural Anthropology and official documents related to indigenous issues (DANTAS and DALARI, 1980; ARRUTI, 2001; FRENCH, 2009). Strictly linguistic research, on the other hand, is either scarce or less conclusive. Purely lexical-grammatical approaches on Native-American groups who exclusively speaks a pluricentric language – as American English, Spanish or Portuguese – can be problematic, for it is not always possible to distinguish the particularities of the group´s language from other non-dominant varieties, presenting structural features very similar to those of languages spoken by socioeconomically disadvantaged minorities, rural populations, or inhabitants of the surrounding region (MATTOS E SILVA, 2004; SIGNORINI, 2012; MELIÀ, 2013). Regarding the Xoco, in particular, it is even disputed the legitimacy of their Native-American ethnicity, given their history of intense admixture with non-indigenous groups, adoption of cultural traits of surrounding communities and near-absence of phenotypic traits traditionally regarded as Native-American (ARRUTI, 2001; FRENCH, 2009; MONTERO, 2012).

In a research conducted in the context of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe, I propose an inquiry on the Xoco´s way of being in language, its continuities and discontinuities in relation to the surrounding society, and how their identity is built as a differentiated ethnic group, that is, their ethnogenesis, through language (ARRUTI, 1997; DURANTI, 1997). The research is carried on through the observation, recording and analysis of Xoco´s conversational practices and contexts, referred to herein as the relational space of language (MATURANA and VARELA, 1980; VIANNA, 2011; VIANNA, 2015), which comprises the joint use of available interactional resources, whether of linguistic, multimodal, or discursive-textual nature, in community, interpersonal and institutional contexts of interaction (BLOMMAERT, 2008; MONDADA, 2008; SIGNORINI, 2012).

It is aim of the research not only to understand the Xoco people´s use of language in their processes of ethnogenesis, but, also, to contribute to an interdisciplinary framework where linguistic, cultural and social research can be done on ethnic minorities who exclusively speaks a non-dominant variety of a pluricentric language, or apparently do so.