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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 781

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Dialect contact, rural speech and the establishment of an urban variety of Brazilian Portuguese

Authors: Santana, Orleane (1); Gomes, Christina Abreu (2)
Submitted by: Gomes, Christina Abreu (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Koine is defined as a variety which results from contact among speakers from mutually intelligible dialects in a context of new settlements with immigrants from different parts of the same monolingual area. This kind of variety results from the mixing and leveling of regionally or socially marked features within the speech community (Kerswill, 2002). This presentation concerns the formation of an urban variety from an originally isolated region at the Amazonian Biome border, a case study about the city of Imperatriz, located at the southern of the state of Maranhão, northern Brazil. This region was firstly reached at the beginning of the 17^th Century, but it was only in 1852 that a Mission of Jesuits coming from Belem through the Tocantins River founded the Vila of Imperatriz. From its foundation until the end of the 1960’s the city was isolated from the capital of Maranhão, with a small contingent of inhabitants and no economic importance, conserving characteristics of rural areas. At the beginning of the seventies, due to the construction of two important main roads linking the north region to the centre of Brazil and its strategic geographic location, the city received a large number of immigrants from 24 states of the federation resulting in a rapid population growth. It became the economic reference of a vast region of three states of the federation. Since the beginning of the nineties the city is also reference for university studies in the region. According to the latest census (IBGE/2010), Imperatriz has 245.509 inhabitants, which characterizes a big city relatively to the size of the cities in the north and northern Brazil. One phonological variable (denazalization of nasal vowels and diphthongs) and one morphological variable (verb agreement) were analysed using data from the Linguistic Atlas of Maranhão (ALiMa) and the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (AliB). The age levels were established according to the three different moments of the history of the city – isolation until 1969 – (speakers aged 50 or more), the economic boom with intense migration from 1970 to 1990 – (speakers between 21 and 49 years-old), period of consolidation as an economic and education reference for a vast region – after 1991 (speakers between 14 to 20 years-old). Denasalization of unstressed vowels and diphthongs and the lack of verbal agreement are highly frequent in rural areas of BP (Amaral, 1920). These variants are stigmatized in urban areas.  Studies about consolidated Southern and South urban varieties of Brazilian Portuguese have shown an increasing of verb agreement even among lower class and lower middle class speakers. For denasalization, stigma depends on the word and the observed patterns indicate a change toward the oral variant for words such bagagem (luggage) and viagem (trip) while it is disfavored in some morphological classes and specific words. The results for Imperatriz data revealed the same tendency observed in other urban varieties for verbal agreement but not for denasalization. The consequences of the high frequency of a rural characteristic in an urban variety for the observed pattern of denasalization are discussed.