BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE RHOTIC VARIATION AND DELETION IN SALVADOR AND SÃO PAULO

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese has two rhotic phonemes: the alveolar flap /ɾ/ and the historically long version which previous publications variously call velar, uvular, or glottal fricatives, or alveolar trills or approximants. This variation occurs both within and across dialects. Deletion is also common, most notably in word-final position. This word-final deletion has been attributed to African influences on Brazilian Portuguese. Salvador is the largest Brazilian city with a population predominantly self-identified as being of African descent (Brazilian census categories preto “black” and pardo “brown” or “mixed race”). Given these factors, there is a question of how race may be tied to deletion of the rhotic in this variety. For this dissertation, 35 participants (self-identified as 21 preto, 6 pardo, 7 white, 1 indigenous) from Salvador were recorded reading predetermined stimuli of isolated words and sentences. Additionally, 10 participants (1 preto, 3 pardo, 6 white) from São Paulo were recorded and demographically matched to a subset of participants from Salvador. There are 6,383 total instances of the rhotic phoneme. Productions were classified as exhibiting deletion or for voicing, frication, flapping, and place characteristics. The results indicate that the surface forms of the phoneme are more variable than previously cited, with palatal fricatives common in Salvador and flap + fricative variants common in São Paulo, along with other less frequent forms. Furthermore, participants identifying as preto or pardo delete the phoneme more frequently than those identifying as white. This difference is further complicated by the fact that most Brazilians, regardless of identification, have a mix of African, Indigenous American, and European ancestry, and a lack of consistent classification of individuals into racial categories. In Salvador, glottal fricatives predominate across the board with higher deletion rates. In São Paulo, glottal fricatives predominate in onset position, but alveolar trills and approximants and flap + fricative variants predominate in coda position. When demographically matched for race, age, gender, and socioeconomic class, deletion rates are higher in Salvador, suggesting that African influences are stronger there than São Paulo. Deletion is the most common word-finally, but it occurs in all environments.