A criação do Vocabulário Terminológico de Conceitos de Língua

Concepts such as mother tongue, first language, non-native language, additional language, foreign language, second language, host language, heritage language, among others, form part of the terminology used in the fields of Language Teaching and Language Policy. They are used to specify relationships between languages, individuals, and society and serve as foundational concepts for the production and dissemination of specialized knowledge developed in these technical-scientific fields. However, this terminological group, which is constantly evolving alongside the development of research in these fields, is also a source of formal and conceptual terminological variation. This variation does not always occur in contrasts between different works but often arises within the scope of a single text. In the specialized literature, it is evident that the same terminological unit can have essentially distinct and generally non-interchangeable definitions. It is also common to observe that, in many cases, the same definition is applied to different terminological units. Aiming to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of the terminology related to language concepts, we developed the Terminological Vocabulary of Language Concepts – VTCL (Lisboa, 2024 – http://vtcl.votec.ileel.ufu.br), the result of our doctoral dissertation. In this paper, we detail the procedures carried out for the creation of the VTCL, which was developed from a specialized corpus consisting of 325 papers, 521 master’s theses, and 117 doctoral dissertations in the field of Portuguese for Speakers of Other Languages, totaling 23,339,211 tokens and 168,227 types. Furthermore, we outline the research motivations, describe the corpus compilation and processing procedures, and detail the methods used for identifying and analyzing terminological units. We also discuss the design of the vocabulary’s macro and microstructure, as well as the creation and completion of terminological records. Finally, we introduce the VTCL, highlighting its fields, resources, and functionalities. Its initial version focuses on ten terminological units (additional language, heritage language, sign language, foreign language, native language, non-native language, official language, first language, and second language (língua segunda and segunda língua)) and includes 28 entries, demonstrating the polysemy present in the targeted terminological group. The vocabulary is still under development, with the aim of covering the 50 language concepts identified in the study corpus.