The Portuguese spoken in Tupí-Guaraní indigenous communities in the states of Pará and Maranhão: the ethnic/non ethnic dialectal continuum in the semantic field Agropastoris Activities

ABSTRACT

This study integrates the project “Linguistic Atlas of Portuguese spoken in Indigenous Areas (ALiPAI)”. The theoretical and methodological background is based on Pluridimensional and Relational Dialecology (Thun, 1998) and Geossociolinguistics (Razky, 1998). The paper aims at analyzing the lexical variation of Portuguese spoken by Indians of origin Tupí-Guaraní from the states of Pará and Maranhão. This lexical investigation focuses on the semantic field ‘agropastoral activities’ of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire (QSL) that was applied for this research. Diatopic, diasexual, diagenerational, diastratic and dialingual dimensions were considered for the analysis. The results indicate the existence of an ethnic non homogeneous dialect continuum in the areas considered, and a shared continuum that extends to the non indigenous areas next to the geographical space of the indigenous areas that were surveyed. Thus, it is concluded that the indigenous areas considered are strongly influenced by the non indigenous communities that surround them.

Keywords:
Lexical variation; Indigenous areas; Tupí-Guaraní; Dialectal continuum