AHC: Preserve Tupi as the dominant language of colonial Brazil

According to the Genocide, it was used as an everyday language by the people of colonial Brazil but a decree by the Marquis of Pombal banned the use of the language in exchange for Portuguese, the explosion of the Jesuits, and a large wave of Portuguese migrants caused the language to quickly decline. And I'm curious whether it's possible to have the Tupi language continue to be used all throughout Brazil and not be replaced by Portuguese.
 
Butterfly away the gold discovery in Minas Gerais as the discovery changed the course of Brazilian history where until then, it was dominated by Northeastern sugar interests with lesser interests of recruiting Portuguese settlers as they had to rely the slave African and the Tupi labor for their survival.
 
Tupi

Another Paraguay? Portuguese as an official language, spoken by a tiny minortity, but Tupi as a vernacular.
 
Butterfly away the gold discovery in Minas Gerais as the discovery changed the course of Brazilian history where until then, it was dominated by Northeastern sugar interests with lesser interests of recruiting Portuguese settlers as they had to rely the slave African and the Tupi labor for their survival.

Without the gold in Minas Gerais you would't have Brazil in OTL form....the gold run to Minas Gerais was pivotal to the integration and development of the Portuguese South American Colonies as an united nation...until them, you had three distinctive colonies: the Northeast, with a sugar based economy and closer links with Portugal, the Southeast, poor and underdeveloped, that lived of enslaving native tribes and constant territorial disputes with the Spanish colonies of Paraguay and Rio de La Plata and the Amazonic North, where population was sparse and a indigenous portuguese-native culture started to develop in the XVII Century.

Without the gold of Minas, you butterfly the exodus of the Portuguese Royal Family to Rio de Janeiro and you keep the division of OTL Brazil in three large blocs...those blocs would split in similar ways as the Spanish colonies did during the Independence Wars of 1810s / 1820s.

Given the closer cultural links with Portugal, the Northeast would keep Portuguese as the main language, with Bahia maybe having african dialects much more present than OTL....the North would also adopt Portuguese as a unifying language given the spread of the country (somewhat close to 50% of OTL Brazil land mass) and the absence of a strong Tupi presence in Amazonia.

The best shot for Tupi would be the Southeastern nation, especially in OTL Sao Paulo, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul state...here you could end with a situation close to OTL Paraguay, where Portuguese would be the "formal" language but Tupi being used daily....in fact, the colonial Sao Paulo was already developing a Portuguese - Tupi creole called "Lingua Geral Paulista"...maybe this would be the second language adopted by this nation after independence.
 
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Another Paraguay? Portuguese as an official language, spoken by a tiny minortity, but Tupi as a vernacular.

That would'nt be equivalent to Paraguay since Guarani is one of Paraguay's Official Languages and Spanish is spoken by most of the population as a second language.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
That's not how colonialism works. Delegitimation of the local language as part of cultural eradication is part and parcel of the colonizer's practice.

So to preserve Tupi Brazil must become independent before some colonial administrator (whoever it is) proclaims Portuguese as the language de jure and before waves of Portuguese settlers.
 
That's not how colonialism works. Delegitimation of the local language as part of cultural eradication is part and parcel of the colonizer's practice.

So to preserve Tupi Brazil must become independent before some colonial administrator (whoever it is) proclaims Portuguese as the language de jure and before waves of Portuguese settlers.

Not finding gold in Minas helps to deflects the waves of Portuguese settlers, especially in the then-poor Southeastern Brazil....without the lure of gold, Portuguese settlers would be more interested in the richer sugar lands of Northeast or event trying to find gold in the remote Amazon rivers....the gold in Minas was the major driver to a stronger colonization of the Portuguese America, a colony that before the gold was considered a backwater in the Portuguese Empire (the Dutch invaded NE Brazil for decades during the 17th. Century and were expelled only with a general insurrection of local lusophone farmers)
 
That's not how colonialism works. Delegitimation of the local language as part of cultural eradication is part and parcel of the colonizer's practice.

So to preserve Tupi Brazil must become independent before some colonial administrator (whoever it is) proclaims Portuguese as the language de jure and before waves of Portuguese settlers.

This is not necessarily true. Look at India, or most of Southeast Asia. How many people in Indonesia speak Dutch? The waves of Portuguese settlers are the part that really causes a language shift.
 

scholar

Banned
This is not necessarily true. Look at India, or most of Southeast Asia. How many people in Indonesia speak Dutch? The waves of Portuguese settlers are the part that really causes a language shift.
The Dutch took Indonesia long after the Portuguese landed in Brazil, and the Indonesians were more inclined to give disease to the Portuguese than the natives of Brazil.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
This is not necessarily true. Look at India,
Where English remains the lingua franca?
or most of Southeast Asia.
English remains a common tongue for Malaysians and Singaporeans and regional communication, though Malay is (was?) the region's lingua franca.
How many people in Indonesia speak Dutch?
The failure of the program does not mean it was not implemented. Generations of Arabs, Chinese, Malay, and others were taught to speak Dutch in Dutch schools. I would also argue that Indonesia is and was more ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse than most European colonies tended to be. You also have the fact that the Bahasa Indonesian language as we know it now was hugely influenced by a reaction to (and later rejection of) Dutch colonialism.

In fact, one could argue that the Dutch were successful in that they were the first to champion its usage as a lingua franca for all of the non-whites in Indonesia, which would make it easier to govern them (colonial officials would only have to learn one language rather than many). What happened was that nationalists turned this against the Dutch when they were building a united Indonesia.
 
Tupi

That would'nt be equivalent to Paraguay since Guarani is one of Paraguay's Official Languages and Spanish is spoken by most of the population as a second language.
From what I hear, it's still quite rare to find many Spanish speakers in rural Paraguay. Most rural residents are monolingual Guarani speakers.
 
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