OS SONS RÓTICOS NA FALA DE DESCENDENTES DE ESLAVOS NO MUNICÍPIO DE REBOUÇAS-PR

Abstract

This research analyzes rhotic variants, variants of r sounds, produced by Brazilian speakers of Slavic descent in a community in the interior of Paraná. The speech data comes from a sample of the sociolinguistic speech database Variação Linguística de Fala Eslava – VARLINFE. To investigate the possible conditioning factors for the realization of rhotic variants, we carried out a Labovian variationist analysis (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006 [1975]). The data analyzed, coming from twelve interviews with speakers of Slavic, Polish or Ukrainian descent, totaled 1,844 occurrences and demonstrated the prevalence of two rhotic variants: the tepe variant, with 65.6% of application, and the velar fricative variant, with 28 .9% application, in contrast to 5.6% for other variants. In view of these results, we performed specific analyzes for the tepe variant and the velar variant with the Goldvarb statistical program. The results indicated that the variables that favor the performance of the tepe were: the syllabic environment, the age group, the sound context before the rhotic, ethnicity, the subsequent sound context and the type of word. Education and gender were excluded by the program as possible conditioning variables for carrying out the tepe in the sample. Regarding the velar variant, the conditioning variables highlighted by the program were: syllabic environment, previous context, age group, ethnicity and education. The variables word type, gender and subsequent context were not considered relevant for the production of r velar. The predominance of the tepe variant and the occurrence of the phenomenon of replacement of strong rhotic variants by this variant are in line with other results of rhotic analyzes in communities of Slavic descendants (Souza, 2022).