Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Talking Portuguese: China and East Timor.

Article Excerpt
The Portuguese in Asia. If this phrase connotes anything at all to Australians, it may bring to mind heroic and ludicrous images of navegados or Franciscan friars in tropical heat. Or perhaps a seaborn dragon on an archaic sixteenth-century map, snarling in uncharted waters as a Man-o-War leans into the trade winds near Socotra, enroute to battle the Turks off Diu. Or maybe the epic stanzas of Luis vas de Camoes' Os Lusiads, commemorated in blue and white azulejo tiles in some neglected Goan museum.

Or maybe that is just me. Certainly, the Australian media seems to think that East Timor is engaged in a bizarre, backward allegiance to Portuguese--a dying language of indifferent colonialists, a kind of Latin with a triple bypass, sweating out its last days under palm trees--which is ritually denounced as if the adoption of Portuguese alone was sufficient to demonstrate the folly of East Timor's first government. The same dry realism dismisses Portuguese as some sort of economic death sentence. Yet this rationalist approach appears to have missed significant developments in the region. Why, if the media pundits are right, are Macau's Portuguese language schools currently full to the brim with several thousand Chinese students?

There are two different language debates: one a debate in East Timor, which is important and interesting to follow, and another about East Timor in Australian commentary, which has become rather one-eyed and predictable. The reality is that the Portuguese language was chosen in Timor-Leste, along with the lingua franca Tetum, as co-official language for symbolic and political reasons.

For the East Timorese resistance, Portuguese was always far more important as a signifier of difference from Indonesia than as a means of communication. That it is now a contested signifier of difference is indisputable. Younger nationalists have not embraced it, despite the persistence of Portuguese acronyms in practically all youth organisations: itself...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!