SOUND CHARACTERISTICS IN THE SPEECH OF UKRAINIAN DESCENDANTS IN BRAZIL

Abstract

Brazil received many Ukrainian immigrants in the 19th century and most of them were sent to the southern region of the country. The municipality of Prudentópolis, a city of approximately 50,000 inhabitants, located in the Center-South region of the State of Paraná and Southern Brazil, received many of these immigrants, mainly from the regions of Galicia and Bukovina (BORUSZENKO, 1995). The city is known as the Brazilian Ukraine, for preserving traditions, customs, religious rituals and keeping alive the memory and language of the Ukrainian people. This article aims to analyze the pronunciation of rhotics, as the sounds of "r" are called, in Brazilian Portuguese by Ukrainian descendants who live in communities in the interior of the city of Prudentópolis, since the use of r is an important dialect mark for the region's speakers. The theoretical foundation of this research is based on the Labovian quantitative variationist sociolinguistics theory (LABOV, 2008 [1972]). The analyzed sample is part of the speech database Linguistic Variation of Slavic Speech – VARLINFE, which consists of oral interviews with Slav, Polish and Ukrainian descendants, residents of the interior of Paraná. The rhotic sounds produced by eight informants were analyzed, totaling 3.906 data. Such occurrences were submitted to statistical treatment with the Goldvarb program. The results revealed the predominance of the rhotic variant tap and pointed out as conditioning factors the syllabic environment in which the sound occurs in the word, the speaker's education, the morphological class of the word and the sound context prior to the rhotic in the word. This research, still in development, contributes to the knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese spoken within the country and in the communities of Ukrainian descendants.