One for all and all for one

the mining community of the municipality of Três Ranchos-Goiás-Brazil

Abstract

In this study we approach the concept of community of practice proposed by Eckert and Mc Connell-Ginet (1992) which, when incorporated into sociolinguistic studies, contributed significantly to research on linguistic variation. For this, we present an analysis of the community of diamond prospectors in the municipality of Três Ranchos, located in the southeast of the state of Goiás-Brazil. The activity deve-loped by these miners was then carried out artisanally and was interrupted in that city in 1981 due to the impoundment of the Paranaíba river, which culminated in the flooding of the places where the precious stones were extracted. How-ever, many of these men, nowadays in their sixties to eighties, recall in their memory the times gone by in the garimpo era and all that was shared between them, such as the vocabulary that named the tools of work, the function each one exercised over the raft and the whole extralinguistic universe related to this activity. We present, there-fore, some lexical units that have led us to the hypothesis that it would be possible to find in the repertoire of the garimpeiros lexical variation. In addition, it was possible to work with the concept of community of practice in a corpus constituted by the collective memory of these gentlemen, in which we find enough data for such an analysis.