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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1072

Part of Session 160: Languages in contact in Brazil (Other abstracts in this session)

Languages in contact: Portuguese and Italian in Espírito Santo, Brasil

Authors: Peres, Edenize Ponzo (1); Loriato, Sarah (2)
Submitted by: Peres, Edenize Ponzo (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil)

Located in the Southwest region of Brazil, the state of Espírito Santo has hosted many immigrants, mostly European immigrants from Vêneto in the North of Italy since the second half of 19^th century. These laborers, despite much effort and hardships, have managed to settle in their lands also preserving their language and culture.  The contact between Portuguese and the foreign languages has, over the past years, favored the former thus gradually eliminating the latter. To understand this process, we carried out a sociolinguistic research on the contact between Portuguese and the Italian dialects in the ten most important cities colonized by immigrants from the North of Italy in the state of Espírito Santo.  The study has been building up a database of speech data through recorded interviews with Italian descendants from those places being selected in accordance with their age (from 8 to 14, from 15 to 30, from 31 to 50, and over 50), gender (male and female), education (up to 4 school years, from 5 to 8 years, and over 8 school years), and geographic origin (urban area and rural area). This study aims to show part of the results obtained along with the data collected from 06 (six) of these municipalities. According to our informants´ data, we seek to primarily describe the linguistic phonetic-phonological consequences of this contact as well as social factors – the power of social interaction and enactments, school and discrimination - that have gradually replaced the immigration language with Portuguese, mainly by descendants who live in urban areas. In rural areas, Vêneto dialect has still been preserved by elderly descendants in meetings with their relatives and friends, religious ceremonies, and events for immigrant memory. Also, this work aims to show efforts and attempts of both public institutions and civil society in some of these communities to preserve their ancestors´ language and culture.

Keywords: Sociolinguistics; Portuguese-Italian linguistic contact; Italian immigration in Espírito Santo.