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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 881

Part of Session 139: Variation and Change in São Paulo (Other abstracts in this session)

How to recognize a Paulistano

Authors: Oushiro, Livia
Submitted by: Oushiro, Livia (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Social descriptions of the city of São Paulo often allude to its diverse and multicultural population, which is highly heterogeneous as to its inhabitants’ geographical origin, socioeconomic class, and cultural background. This diversity naturally brings with it a number of variable linguistic phenomena.

This paper addresses one of the core questions of this thematic session, “What does it mean to sound like a Paulistano?”. We address this question through a systematic analysis of sociolinguistic perceptions and evaluations of Paulistanos about their own speech and identity, gathered as part of 100 one-hour long sociolinguistic interviews with speakers stratified by sex/gender, three age groups, two levels of education, and two areas of residence within the city.

The interviews included the following questions: (i) “When you were in (another city), did people recognize you as a Paulistano? How?”; (ii) “When you are in the city, do you notice if another person is a Paulistano or not? How?”; (iii) “When you meet a Paulistano, do you recognize if the person is from a specific neighborhood or region in the city? How?” In answer to the first two questions, speakers almost invariably said “yes”, and mentioned the manner of speech and style of dress as the main reasons. However, speakers were rarely able to point to local internal sociolinguistic identity indices. Unlike other cities such as New York (Labov, 2006) and Toronto (Hoffman & Walker, 2010), there do not seem to be enclaves with recognizable local ‘lects’. It seems that in spite of its social diversity, Paulistano speech is fairly homogenous in terms of speaker perception.

Specific questions in the interview were also aimed at eliciting speaker reactions to three sociolinguistic variables: realization of nasal /e/ as a monophthong or a diphthong (in words such as fazenda ‘farm’), nominal agreement (e.g. as casas vs. as casa ‘the houses’), and realization of coda /-r/ (in words such as porta ‘door’). Whereas Paulistanos rarely recognize the diphthongization of nasal /e/ as a salient sociolinguistic feature in their speech, variable nominal agreement tends to be viewed as an index of socioeconomic differentiation and variable coda /-r/ as an index of geographical origin.

As a large multicultural city that has received little attention from variationists (Mendes, 2009; Rodrigues, 2009), this analysis supports the combination of emic and etic approaches to social categorization and contributes to defining parameters for future sociolinguistic research in the city.

References

Hoffman, M. F. and J. Walker (2010) Ethnolects and the City: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22, 37–67.

Labov, W. (2006) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mendes, Ronald Beline (2009) Who sounds /r/-ful? The pronunciation of /r/ in São Paulo Portuguese. Paper presented at NWAV 38.

Rodrigues, Angela C. S. (2009) Fotografia sociolinguística do português do Brasil: o português popular em São Paulo. In: Castilho, Ataliba T. (Ed.), História do Português Paulista. Vol. I, Série Estudos. Campinas: IEL/Publicações.