FACTORS RELATED TO THE NEUTRALIZATION OF RHOTICS AND THE DEPLATATION OF [tʃ] AND [dʒ] IN PORTUGUESE BY HISPANOSPEAKERS

Abstract

The work comprises the migratory flow of Latin Americans to Brazil and Portuguese as an additional language necessary for the social insertion of this group, so that there is communication with the natives and understanding of rights and duties in the country they are in. The phonological acquisition of the Portuguese language is understood as part of the language learning process and, based on the first author’s general perception from her social networks of a common speech to the region of Vale dos Sinos/RS, data was collected with four immigrants from three different countries in order to identify phonological processes that diverged from the common production and justify their occurrence. The phonological systems of Portuguese and Spanish were contrasted and, in the analysis of the audios, it was identified the neutralization of rhotics and the deplatalization of /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, differently from what the speech considered common to the region points out. The causes for both processes are justified by different factors: the neutralization of the strong-R was inversely proportional to the time of residence of speakers in Brazil, while the deplatalization might happen due the time of formal studies of the speaker in Brazilian Portuguese.