Speakers
Description
Portuguese is the official language of nine countries and one territory. However, given the socio-historical contexts of these countries, its functional status varies greatly. In Brazil, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe (Hagemeijer, 2018), Portuguese is the mother tongue for the majority of the population. In Angola and Mozambique, it is the majority vehicular language, typically as a second language (Inverno, 2018; Chimbutane, 2018). In Cape Verde, GuineaBissau (Pinto & Melo-Pfeifer, 2018, pp. 1112) and Timor-Leste (Carioca, 2016), it is a minority language. In Equatorial Guinea, it only has an official status from a formal point of view (Correia, 2019, p. 125). Portuguese has been codified and standardized in Portugal and Brazil, with the European variety being adopted as the norm in the other countries. Nevertheless, researchers have shown that local varieties of Portuguese have been emerging, and descriptions of Mozambican Portuguese (Gonçalves P., 2010; Firmino, 2011), Angolan Portuguese (Adriano, 2015; Inverno, 2009) and Sao Tomean Portuguese (Gonçalves R., 2016; Bouchard, 2017) can be found. In spite of this reality, there are no general monolingual dictionaries describing varieties of Portuguese other than the ones used in Brazil and Portugal (although the compilation of a Dictionary of Mozambican Portuguese is currently underway; see Machungo & Firmino, 2022). It is in this context that the Research Centre for Linguistics Studies at the University of Coimbra (CELGA-ILTEC) is currently developing resources and methodologies for a dictionary of Portuguese as a pluricentric language, which aims to cover all the varieties of Portuguese. According to Atkins & Rundell (2008) and Lew (2015), the initial stage of any new lexicographic project is defining the profile of its users. Thus, we have created a survey to obtain information about the potential users of this new dictionary so that it can be designed to meet their needs: the Survey on the Use of Dictionaries of Portuguese in Portuguesespeaking Countries – USODIPO https://www.uc.pt/celga-iltec/usodipo/. USODIPO is the first large-scale survey of this type targeted at speakers of Portuguese in all Portuguese-speaking countries. It was administered in eight countries (Equatorial Guinea was not included) between April and July 2023. The methodology adopted is an online, self-administered, anonymous questionnaire. In this paper, we will first provide an overview of the situation of Portuguese in the countries and region where it is an official language. Next, we will present the survey, including its context of origin, objectives, methodology and structure. Finally, we will present some of the main results. We believe the results of the survey will provide a significant contribution to lexicography of Portuguese in general, and to lexicography of pluricentric languages specifically. Moreover, the results might shed light on lexicography carried out in other multilingual countries in which the language described in the dictionaries that are available and traditionally adopted by the population and in schools are not in alignment with the variety of the language as it is used by their nationals on a daily basis.
