Descrição da nasalidade no município de barreirinha, comunidade do Andirá, no Amazonas

Abstract

The nasality in Portuguese is a rich topic of study in linguistic aspects. The aim of this essay is to describe the nasality in the speech of native residents of Barreirinha, in the Community of Freguesia do Andirá, located north of the city of Parintins and east of the state of Pará, 331 km from the capital of Amazonas, Manaus. Through a diachronic study of nasality from Latin to the modern Portuguese, it is possible to identify its emergence and its transformations throughout history. Some aspects of nasality in archaic Portuguese, especially the variation that existed in Lisbon-Coimbra, described by Bueno (1967), works out as an aid to understanding the phenomenon that has been registered in the Community of Andirá. This phenomenon comes from the oral sound production of vowels in phonological environments, where, for the usual conventions of Portuguese phonology, should suffer slight nasalization, for example, the vowel /a/ in the word santo. Among the other objectives of this study, we highlight the quantification of the phenomenon investigated and registered in the Community, and the set up of hypotheses that may explain its occurrence. It was used as a parameter for identification and verification of the phenomenon in question, descriptions of nasality in Phonetics and Phonology of Portuguese. This is a qualitative and quantitative study, which follows the parameters of the theory social variationist theory. Data collection was performed in the Freguesia do Andirá through an interview to 18 (eighteen) informants, being 06 (six) men and 06 (six) women, from 03 (three) different age groups, young people, adults and elderly, whom were natives and residents of the Community. The corpus included 69 (sixty-nine) words. The data were analyzed lighted by the Experimental Phonetics, using the Praat software, through which we obtained experimental tools to record the phenomenon. And yet, we followed the patterns of the variationist sociolinguistics to analyze the data in terms of the variations gender/sex, age and education level. The data analysis indicated the discovery of a variation of nasality in Barreirinha, which resembles the variation occurring in the archaic Portuguese, and also pointed to an ongoing transformation of the phenomenon, considering the analyzed sociolinguistic variables