Análise variável dos róticos em Ibitiruí, Alfredo Chaves/ES: uma marca afetiva do “Engano”
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Data
2025-10-23
Autores
Fiorin, Márcio Favero
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Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
Resumo
This study investigates the effects of linguistic contact between Brazilian Portuguese and the Venetian language in communities of descendants of Italian immigrants in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, with a specific focus on the variation of rhotics in Ibitiruí, a district of the municipality of Alfredo Chaves. Italian immigration, which began in the late nineteenth century, brought to the state a population largely originating from the Veneto region, a province in northern Italy, whose language has been maintained across generations as an affective heritage and a symbol of identity in contexts of asymmetric bilingualism. Although Venetian has declined in everyday use, especially among younger generations, it continues to play a relevant symbolic role, influencing local linguistic and sociocultural practices. The study is based on a corpus of eighteen sociolinguistic interviews, totaling nineteen informants, mostly members of the Ibitiruí community or individuals who have spent most of their lives there. The interviews were conducted in a semi-structured format and addressed topics related to life trajectories, cultural practices, community memory, and linguistic identity. The sample was stratified by sex, age group, and level of schooling, and the data were analyzed through two envelopes of variation: one reflecting the influence of the Venetian language, which includes realizations considered canonical in that language, and another without Venetian influence, associated with innovative variants or those more closely aligned with general trends in Portuguese. With regard to phonetic environments, the findings show that wordinitial position and, above all, intervocalic position—especially medial syllable coda—are the contexts that most favor the realization of traits associated with Venetian, such as the alveolar tap [ɾ] and, to a lesser extent, the alveolar trill [r]. In contrast, word-final syllable coda favors the emergence of aspirated variants and deletion, constituting a space of phonetic innovation in the local repertoire. The data were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis using the R platform (R Core Team, 2016) and complemented by a qualitative analysis grounded in the literature of Variationist Sociolinguistics (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006; LABOV, 2008 [1972]), Language Contact (WEINREICH, 1970; FISHMAN, 1991; TRUDGILL, 1992; MONTRUL, 2013), and studies on rhotic variation in Brazilian Portuguese (CÂMARA JR., 1983; 1992; CALLOU; LEITE, 1996; 2004). The results indicate the predominance of the alveolar tap [ɾ] as the canonical form in the community, accounting for approximately 70% of occurrences, followed by the glottal fricative [h], the velar fricative [x], and deletion [Ø]. Due to its low frequency, the alveolar trill [r] was grouped with the tap for analytical purposes. In this sense, rhotic variation in Ibitiruí goes beyond a purely phonetic phenomenon, reflecting historical, social, and identity-related dynamics, and functioning as an affective marker of Engano. The study advances the hypotheses that: (i) phonetic environments that signal Venetian influence— especially word-initial position and medial syllable coda—tend to be evaluated negatively or stigmatized by younger speakers, albeit implicitly; and (ii) beyond schooling, extralinguistic factors such as the social status associated with Venetian-speaking groups play a central role in the process of heritage language shift and in the loss of its phonetic and phonological traits
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Róticos , Imigração italiana em Alfredo Chaves, ES , Sociolinguística variacionista , Contato linguístico , Marca de afetividade