Manuel Joaquim Delgado

Professor, ethnographer, and poet. Although beholden to the Salazar regime, his work contributed to laying the foundations of regional ethnography, particularly in the Alentejo. Part of his works are published in Arquivo de Beja, in the journal Ocidente, in the Proceedings of the Colloquium of Ethnographic Studies Dr. José Leite de Vasconcelos, and in Mensário das Casas do Povo. Advocating the need for a folklore chair in primary teacher training schools, a specialist in Romance Philology and a collaborator of Revista de Portugal: Língua Portuguesa for over seventeen years, the author undertook an effort to systematize linguistic problems, specifically those concerning etymology and vernacularity in speech and writing, regionalist ethnography, and the collection of popular quatrains, songs, and poetic compositions of Alentejo expression, which made his work pioneering with regard to the studied region, due to the mass of research produced in the meantime. He also collaborated with the newspapers Diário do Alentejo, Notícias de Beja, A Planície (Moura), Boletim da Casa do Alentejo, and Boletim da Sociedade de Língua Portuguesa. He was one of the founding members of the Sociedade de Língua Portuguesa and a correspondent for the Instituto Português de Arqueologia, História e Etnografia.