“E Aquela Peça com Dentes que Se Encaixam?”: uma análise geossociolinguística do português falado no Maranhão

What About that Device of Two Teeth Rows Which Interlock?: a geossoiolinguistic analysis of Portuguese spoken in Maranhão

Abstract

Language is heterogeneous and it is Always changing. Based on it, this research aims to verify the lexical variants within the Clothing and Acessories field of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire (SLQ) from the Linguistic Atlas of Maranhao. In order to do it, it has been considered the social varieties – gender and age – and also the diatopic one. The semantic area contains nine questions, however, in this present study, it was narrowed down to the 220 question only, which refers to “feiche éclair” due to its eloquent lexical variant. The corpus of this research is constituted by the ALiMA project network in the following cities: São Luís, Raposa, Pinheiro, Alto Parnaíba, Balsas, Carolina, Araioses, Brejo, São João dos Patos, Caxias, Imperatriz, Turiaçu, Carutapera Bacabal e Tuntum. To collect the data, it was needed four informants of both genders and two age groups: 18 to 30 years old and 50 to 65 years old, all of them are from an incomplete elementary level of schooling. In addition, four more informants from São Luís were also selected, who have a higher level of education. Besides, this work is supported by the Dialetology and Geossociolinguistic theoretical and methodological assumptions. As a result to the concerned discussion, the variant “reque” was presented only on the male informants’ speech [ANI1], and mainly on the 50-65 years individuals (67%) while the youngest ones presented 33% of occurancy. The variant “ri-ri” was mostly seen on the male informants (57%), but it was observed on the female individuals too (43%). It was highly observed on the oldest subjects (71%), and less seen on the youngest ones (29%). To sum up, these results show the importance of the elderly speakers in maintaning some lexical forms, as well as they point the male speakers as the responsible for keeping the lexical inheritances of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Maranhão.