Language Policy and Planning: An Analysis of the Themes Present in Research in Brazil

ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to present an overview of the themes discussed in the field of Language Policy and Planning over the last twenty-one years (1990-2010) in Brazil, comparing the alignment of Brazilian research with the international scenario. To that end, expanded notions of language policy were adopted (COOPER, 1989; SHIFFMAN, 1996, 2006; SPOLSKY, 2004, 2009, 2012) and a survey was carried out in order to find the number of articles in the field in a sample of abstracts from Brazilian academic journals of Linguistics and Literature. The main themes identified in this study were: educational language policies, language planning, languages in contact, diffusion of the Portuguese language, and (meta)linguistic knowledge and language policies. On the one hand, these themes show a convergence between Brazilian and international trends; however, on the other, they show a specific thematic trend in the former, that is, the interest in the constitution of (meta)linguistic knowledge in relation to language policy.