The history is present: the influence of Italian dialects on the young students’ speech in Portuguese from the west of Santa Catarina

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research that focused on the analysis of linguistic variation that characterizes the interference of Italian dialects from Veneto as an immigration language, also called Talian in a Brazilian scenario, in Brazilian Portuguese speech. s It is evidenced especially by a phenomenon of phonological variation with the production of tepe in contexts of multiple vibrant, leading to the production of the word “caro” when the expected word would be “carro”. Based on previous studies on the subject, the study delimited the analysis in a group of 20 young speakers, students of final years of elementary school (age between 12 to 16 years, in the period of the research development). As a theoretical basis for the study, we follow the precepts of the Theory of Variation or Quantitative Sociolinguistics. The research results, with the quantitative analysis of the linguistic data, through the VARBRUL statistical program (PINTZUK, 1988), showed a marked variation in the students’ speech, who produced tepe in 76% of the contexts of vibrant multiple both in the beginning of the word, as in “Roma”, and in the intervocalic position of multiple vibrant, as in “terra”. The data show the maintenance of this phenomenon in variation, already identified in research developed since the 1980s, even in the case of young subjects, most of them non-native speakers of the language of their ethnic group.