A influência nordestina sobre o falar amapaense: um recorte dos dados do Atlas Linguístico do Amapá - ALAP

Abstract

The Northeastern migrations constitute one of the main factors for the comprehension of the current spatial distribution of the Brazilian population and are determining for the comprehension of various linguistic phenomena found in Brazilian Portuguese. Amapá is one of the states that had its society’s formation composed, to a great extent, by Northeastern migrants. Although this speech community constitutes an important portion of Amapá’s society and is relevant for the comprehension of the variety of Brazilian Portuguese found in Amapá, it has been observed that there are no linguistic studies in the state geared towards this community. In view of this, this study, which is based on the theoretical-methodological framework of variationist sociolinguistics, aims to highlight the Northeastern influence on Amapá’s speech through a linguistic data cut collected and published by Amapá’s Linguistic Atlas – ALAP (RAZKY; RIBEIRO; SANCHES, 2017). The data selection took place, in the first moment, based on the personal vocabulary of the researcher of this study, who belongs to the Northeastern speech community and lives in the state of Amapá, using her personal experience and including herself as subject of the study. On the second part, based on the results obtained and published by studies under the framework of Amapá’s Linguistic Atlas Project – ALAP and Brazil’s Linguistic Atlas Project – ALIB. To reach our purpose, the following lexical items have been extracted: capote, muriçoca, quenga and mangará. These lexical units are covered, respectively, in the following lexical cards from Amapá’s Linguistic Atlas – ALAP: CARTA L17 “galinha d’angola”; CARTA L25 “pernilongo”; CARTA L48 “prostituta”; and CARTA L73 “parte terminal da inflorescência da banana”. As a result, it has been observed that linguistic variants recorded officially as “Brazilian Northeastern regionalism” have been catalogued in the speech from Amapá. In view of this, in addition to confirming the Northeastern influence on the formation of the variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Amapá and the importance of subsequent studies about this speech community, this study also points out some criticism of the homogeneous perspective of the variationist studies and emphasizes the need for the adoption of a heterogeneous and sociohistorical perspective that interprets the society, the language and the speech community as the heterogeneous and dynamic sets they are.