Langue et identite des societes insulaires: l 'exemple de l 'Ile de Madere (dans L'atlantique Lusophone)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to bring forth the notion of insularity in terms of frontier space, hybrid by definition, characterised by a dynamic relation and inner and outer fluctuation. First and foremost, we try to identify to what extent this configuration could get involved in the collective memory, the social life and in the identity construction of island people. Besides other forms of manifestations of identity stakes, the language, made up of stories, of shared references and of corpora of shared practices, would allow the subjects to track down the outreach of identity versus alterity. As part of the linguistic acclimatisation in an island context, the Portuguese language of the first colonisers who arrived on the Island of Madeira in the XVth century, has undergone a path marked both by isolation and linguistic contact with the overseas lands, resulting in an acknowledged, if little researched, regional variety. This variety circumscribed to periphery, discontinued against the varieties of peninsular Portuguese, is shaped as interwoven with a diversity of competing variants (conservatory, normative and innovative). The dialectal uniqueness, under the heterogeneity of socially structured usages, will be envisaged, in the present article, as the reflection, from a symbolic perspective, of an identity process led by these Lusophone island specialists, engaged in the debate on the multiple significances attached to their singularity.