Oral cultures and multilingualism in a world of big digital data: The case of Portuguese speaking countries

摘要

This paper briefly presents the linguistic theoretical principles in Portuguese-speaking countries that do not enhance the representation of most local languages in digital space, in national space, and particularly in the formal public space of teaching and learning. It proposes the understanding of theoretical linguistic thought in Brazil as preferentially working in monolingual situations erasing multilingual reality and mainly in written works erasing oral history and oracy, due to theoretical choices. It is this understanding of language as an object recognized in monolingual environment that promotes a lack of models to deal with multilingual environment, specially in digital world. It presents data on living languages today in the world and on those that are part of the world wide web. And from these data, it considers the notion of big data in relation to the linguistic reality of multilingual countries that have Portuguese as their official language, particularly considering the activities of study and production of knowledge. We reflect on our Portuguese-speaking official and written reality, where the big data is located, and the possibilities of working with local languages inspired on the idea of polyphony, in order to promote local languages representation in digital world.