ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic history of Brazil, highlighting the role played by contact between the Portuguese language and the indigenous Amerindian languages and African languages. The changes resulting from contact acquisition of Portuguese by millions of acculturated Indians and enslaved Africans, and the nativization of this second language among their descendants, led to a linguistic division of Brazilian society. This division remains to this day, despite having been diminished by the industrialization and urbanization of the country, which effectively began in 1930. To describe the changes that affected the current varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), we present a theory of how the contact between languages affects the structure of grammar.
