Dialect contact and acquisition: migrants in São Paulo

Abstract

While language contact is a widely studied topic, contact between speakers of different varieties of the same language hasn’t been explored to the same extent. The lecture focuses on variation patterns of five linguistic phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese (mid-vowel height, coda /r/, /t,d/ palatalization, nominal agreement, and sentence negation) in the speech of Northeastern migrants living in the Southeastern city of São Paulo. Research results show that dialect acquisition of different linguistic traits tend to co-occur within the same domain (phonetic or morphosyntactic), but that it is less consistent across domains. The implications of these findings for linguistic theory will be discussed.