ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical panorama of how language and educational policies regarding the Indigenous languages in Brazil were shaped in the past and how they are still being shaped today. The image of Brazil, as a monolingual country with Portuguese as its official language, has already been naturalized among its citizens. The educational model of civilizing monolingualism was, at first, predominant in the colonial period, with both General Languages being used—as stepping stones to the Lusophonization later consolidated in Imperial Brazil and Republican Brazil. Its aim was to bring about a coercive process of language shift by imposing the Portuguese language. The discourse of the Brazilian State regarding the promotion of Indigenous languages, as well as the policies put in place for that specific purpose and the process of language policy implementation, can be assessed at different levels: at a political level and at an educational level.
