Denominations for the lexical item “diabo” in capitals of Brazil: a Geolinguistic study with data from the linguistic Atlas Project Of Brazil

Abstract

The article analyzes the denominations for the lexical item diabo in the North and in the Northeast of Brazil. For this, surveys of the Atlas Linguístico do Brasil Project were used, carried out with 120 informants, equally distributed by both sexes, in two age groups and two levels of education, selected according to the criteria of Contemporary Dialectology. There were registered 332 lexical items, concretized through thirty-one variants: bad angel, antichrist, beast, beast, beelzebub, ugly beast, bad beast, dog, devil, capiroto, horn, bad thing, cramunon, creature, cross- creed, demo, devil, disgrace, devil, grimy, brimstone, enemy, lucifer, nephisto, prince of heaven, sapiric, satan, satan, dirty, withered, stuff. The study served to demonstrate the linguistic and cultural diversity of the religious lexicon of Portuguese spoken in the North and Northeast of Brazil, being extremely important for the knowledge of the multidimensionality that the Portuguese language assumes in different physical and sociocultural spaces.