¡Oye!: Language and business between Brazil and Spain

Abstract

In this study about the international spread of the Spanish language, we focus on the analysis of the agreement ¡Oye! Espanhol para professores, signed in September 2006 by Spain’s Banco de Santander and the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo. The purpose of the agreement, which also involved the Cervantes Institute, was the training of 45,000 teachers of Spanish to operate in Brazilian Secondary Education. It was for the most part rejected by the education community, which mobilized to stop its implementation. In this article we describe and analyze different actions and discourses surrounding the agreement and the ensuing controversy, and examine the media coverage of both the agreement and the opposition to it. On the one hand we show that economic interests take priority over cultural cooperation, and that language spread agents follow a business logic, approaching language spread as a lucrative activity and as the spearhead of commercial diffusion. On the other hand, we interpret the reaction of opponents to the agreement in terms of the tensions brought about by the coexistence of national and global contexts in language policy. We concluded that some of the strategies used by the agents of language promotion and commercial expansion in order to counter resistance were, first, the erasure of the opposition and, second, the building of an alternative community, the iberoamerican community, in which the political nature of their operations was neutralized and their presence naturalized.

Key words: Banco Santander, linguistic commodification, Spanish in Brazil, globalization, linguistic ideology, Instituto Cervantes, language spread, ¡OYE!, Department of Education of the State of São Paulo.