The configuration of the East Timor Enunciation space: languages, disputes and history
Timor-Leste, history, languages, space of enunciation.
The objective of this master’s research in Linguistics is to analyze the configuration of the enunciation space of Timor-Leste by the perspective of Semantic of Event theory by Guimarães (2002, 2018). Timor-Leste is a small multilingual country located in Southeast Asia. Its linguistics diversity reflects a historical journey marked by different periods. It was colonized by Portugal from 1512 to 1975, with Portuguese as its official language. During the Second World War, the country was occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945, and was later invaded by Indonesia, becoming its 27th province for 24 years. In 1999, Timor-Leste gained its independence through a referendum promoted by the United Nations and restored its sovereignty in 2002, being internationally recognized as the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. Due to the country’s a complex linguistic distribution, consisting of national languages (indigenous), official languages, working languages, and immigrant languages, we set out to investigate how this configuration of the distribution space of languages and speakers in Timor-Leste occurred and how this distribution affects the relationship between languages and speakers in this place. To this end, we will adopt as our theoretical framework the theory of the semantic of enunciation by Guimarães (2002, 2018), and other collaborators such as Karim (2022, 2023), Alvares (2023), Szubris (2025), Lara (2025).