The colonial invention of languages in America

Abstract

We aim at critically discussing the colonial process of language discursivization in America. Such discursivization integrated Iberian colonial mechanism, centered in Spain and Portugal, from the sixteenth century on. The paper presents and discusses the way languages and people were put into discourses from a power matrix centered on the logic of modernity/coloniality. Examples of this discursivization include the production of grammars, dictionaries, word lists, catechisms and the translation of religious and administrative European discursive genres to non-European context. It is argued that the colonial discursivization of peoples and languages was made from an Eurocentric interpretation which left its effects until today. The article relies on the theoretical framework of colonial Linguistics and Latin American postcolonial criticism, both focused on a historical and discursive perspective on the colonial practices. Finally, we consider that the colonial experience is complex, which means that the colonial encounter produced the emergence of resistance and cultural hybridizations