Deconstructing sociolinguistic stereotypes

the realization of /S/ in the Araguaia Region of Pará

Abstract

In Brazilian Portuguese, the fricative /S/ characterizes linguistic communities (Hora, 2002; Lucchesi, 2009; Scherre; Macedo, 1991), with notable variation between the alveolar variants [s, z] and the alveopalatal variants [ʃ, ʒ]. In Pará, the alveopalatal variant [ʃ, ʒ] holds the status of a standard, marking Pará’s regional identity (Jesus; Mota, 2009a; Razky ; Santos, 2020). This article primarily investigates sociolinguistic variation involving the archiphoneme /S/ in medial coda position in Pará, focusing on a region that remains underexplored in sociolinguistic studies: the Araguaia region of Pará. We conducted a field study, based on Labovian sociolinguistics, in five municipalities (Conceição do Araguaia, Redenção, Santana do Araguaia, Santa Maria das Barreiras, and Xinguara), interviewing 79 participants. For data analysis, we used the R software (R Core Team, 2023) to perform a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The dependent variable was the realization of the alveolar variants [s, z] versus the alveopalatal variants [ʃ, ʒ]. Independent variables included social factors (gender, municipality, locality, and speech style) and linguistic factors (preceding and following phonetic contexts, stress, morphological class, and word length), which were controlled as fixed effects. Additionally, Participant and Item were included as random effects. Our results reveal that, unlike the northern region of Pará, in the Araguaia region, the alveolar variant [s, z] emerges as the standard (68.5%) compared to the alveopalatal variant [ʃ, ʒ] (31.5%) (N = 9,793). We found that the alveopalatal variant [ʃ, ʒ] is favored in stressed syllables and before /t/, being more frequent among male participants. Another observed aspect was stylistic monitoring, with a higher occurrence of the alveolar variant [s, z] in more monitored contexts (e.g., reading news articles and word lists), reinforcing its standard status. Thus, regarding /S/ in medial coda position, our findings indicate that the sociolinguistic reality among speakers in the Araguaia region of Pará aligns more closely with communities in the Northeast, such as São Luís-MA and Teresina-PI, and the Southeast, such as São Paulo-SP and Belo Horizonte-MG (Mota; Jesus; Evangelista, 2010). This diverges from the linguistic stereotype of Pará, where the alveopalatal variant [ʃ, ʒ] is considered the standard in both internal coda (e.g., pista [ˈpiʃtɐ]) and external coda (e.g., dois [ˈdoɪʃ]).