A vast amount of literature addresses issues surrounding English and French in colonial and post-colonial communities. However, relative to the spread of English and French language ideology, a limited amount of literature exists on Lusitanization (i.e. the spread of Portuguese colonial ideology by Portugal during colonialism and the role of Brazil in post-colonial Portuguese societies). To fill this gap, this paper analyses the role, functions and spread of Portuguese in colonial and post-colonial Angola and East Timor using Lusitanization as a framework to capture the role played by Portugal during the colonial eras and Brazil in post-colonial societies. Even though Lusitanization creates a space to analyse the role of Portuguese at a macro-level, a macro-view is inadequate for a situated analysis. Therefore, to complement the macro-analysis, we explore the impact of Lusitanization from the bottom up, drawing upon Bakhtinian perspectives of social voices, pluri-diversity, plurilingualism and hybridization.