Migration, dialect contact and the establishment of the urban variety of Imperatriz (MA)

• Autor(a) principal: Evangelista Santana, Orleane
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Abreu Gomes, Christina
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/46772
• topic: Contato Dialetal; Migração; Variedade urbana; Fala Rural; Português Brasileiro; Dialect Contact; Migration; Urban variety; Rural speech; Brazilian Portuguese

This paper presents the results of social variables of a study about two linguistic variables, with data from speakers from the city of Imperatriz (MA) in order to identify the strengthening of this urban variety with a recent rural past. The variety of Imperatriz is the outcome of a contact-induced process (TRUDGILL, 1986; BRITAIN; TRUDGILL, 1999), due to the intense migration of speakers from several regional varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, associated to an accelerated urban growth. The stratification of the speech sample by age sought to identify the speakers according the successive economic cycles of the city, which allows for the association of the acquisition of the local variety to different migratory waves going from the period of greater isolation as a rural community until periods with intense migration. The results for apparent time show that, among the younger speakers, who acquired the local variety in the period of intense urbanization, a decrease in the use of variants associated to rural speech, and the increase of prestige variants found in large cities, such as the prevalence of the marked forms of 3rd plural person for 3rd plural subjects over the unmarked forms, and the decrease of the semivowel, as in [ʹpaɪ̭ə] (palha), and the increase of the lateral followed by a semivowel, as in [ʹpalɪ̭ə] (‘straw’). We present evidence that, in the implementation of the lateral, the directionality of the change is due to the intense urbanization and also to the presence of a strong contingent from different regions of the state of Pará, which presents low rates of the semivowel.