Rhotics in the Salvador, Bahia, dialect of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese has two rhotic phonemes: the alveolar flap /ɾ/ and another variable phoneme historically identified as the long version of the rhotic. Across publications, this phoneme has been identified as a velar, uvular, or glottal fricative, or as an alveolar trill or approximant. These phones vary within and across dialects. Deletion, especially word-finally, is also common. This paper examines a poorly documented variety, known for deletion of the rhotic, spoken in Salvador. Thirty-five participants read predetermined stimuli of isolated tokens and sentences (total rhotic phones = 5192). Acoustic and auditory analyses indicate the range of possible surface forms of the rhotic phoneme is more variable than previously cited, with the additional surface forms of palatal and velar fricatives as well as the uvular trill being common and a variety of additional, less common surface forms. When followed by a vowel, word-final rhotics are often neutralized with flaps. Among the possible surface forms, however, the glottal fricatives dominate. While deletion is most common word-finally, it occurs in all environments where the phoneme is found. Exploration of variation across speakers and its connection to demographic variation in the speakers is ongoing and will be reported.