Habilidade na escrita e nível de letramento de escreventes do Rio Grande do Sul nos séculos séculos XIX e XX

Abstract

Studies such as those by Marquilhas (2000), Barbosa (2005, 2017), Santiago (2012), among others, propose that it is possible to characterize the ability of a writer, that is, his/her greater or lesser familiarity with writing, based on the observation of physical-graphical and graphic and phonetic aspects. This kind of description allows us to identify the level of literacy of the writers, which can help to compose their socio-linguistic profiles, especially when documents produced by non-distinguished people are contemplated. In this paper, we analyze five manuscripts of four writers from the cities of Santa Maria and Silveira Martins, both located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Southern Brazil), written in the late nineteenth century (1890) and early twentieth century (1901). These texts belong to the collection named Junta Intendencial of the Municipal Historic Archives of Santa Maria. The documents were photographed and transcribed faithfully in order to retain their original features. Issues related to the layout of the letters, the use of abbreviations, the substitution of segments (consonants and vowels), unconventional word segmentation, and the use of Latinized words were observed in the manuscripts so as to determine the closeness of the writers to the written code. In general, we found that all the writers have a low level of literacy.