O rotacismo no português popular do Estado da Bahia

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenon of rhotacism in the popular Portuguese of the State of Bahia. The phenomenon analyzed results from the substitution of the lateral consonant /l/ by a rhotic, and it may occur in two syllabic environments: complex onset, as in flauta ~ frauta, and syllable coda, as in malvado ~ marvado. In the analysis presented here, the focus is the occurrence of rhotacism in tautosyllabic consonant clusters, that is, in the context of complex onset. The research follows the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008 [1972]), therefore both linguistic and social variables are considered. The objective is to describe the variable phonetic-phonological phenomenon of rhotacism in communities of the State of Bahia and to discuss its sociolinguistic behavior within the urbanization continuum proposed by Bortoni-Ricardo (2004) and Lucchesi (2015). Since it is a stigmatized phenomenon, the hypothesis adopted is that the farther a community is from the state capital, the greater the application of rhotacism, given that the phenomenon is usually associated with speakers from areas farther away from major urban centers (Bagno, 2007). To this end, we observed the phenomenon in speech data from the three archives that make up the Projeto Vertentes, coordinated by professors Dante Lucchesi and Gredson dos Santos. These are: the archive of popular Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, consisting of the communities of Helvécia, Sapé, Cinzento, and Rio de Contas; the archive of popular Portuguese from the interior of the State of Bahia, composed of the communities of Poções and Santo Antônio de Jesus, both in their urban centers and rural areas; and the archive of popular Portuguese of Salvador, composed of the neighborhoods of Itapuã, Cajazeiras, Plataforma, and Liberdade. Speech data from 144 participants were analyzed, 12 in each community, of both sexes, with little or no schooling, distributed across three age groups. The data from each archive were submitted to statistical analysis through logistic regression, a generalized linear mixed-effects model, using the R software (R Core Team, 2024) in the RStudio interface. As main results, we highlight that the only variable that proved significant for all archives was the presence of another liquid segment in the word, with the absence of this segment favoring the application of the phenomenon. In the Afro-Brazilian communities, the community of Cinzento proved unfavorable to the realization of the phenomenon; in the interior of the State, male speakers proved unfavorable in comparison to female speakers; in the capital, speakers in age group III showed favoring of the phenomenon. Regarding the distribution of rhotacism along the urbanization continuum, the results indicate a substantial inversion of the hypothesis formulated. The Afro-Brazilian communities, which we assumed would more strongly favor the realization of rhotacism, turned out to be unfavorable; the state capital, where a very low or almost nonexistent presence of the phenomenon was expected, proved to be the context that most favored its realization in the data observed; the interior of the State, in turn, exhibited a pattern that does not differ from the capital. Finally, the general interpretation of the results obtained for the phenomenon of rhotacism in the popular Portuguese of the State of Bahia seems to indicate that phenomena with more restricted environments of application, and for which exhaustive data collection is necessary, as is the case of the phenomenon studied here, cannot be observed without considering the issue of lexical frequency.