Polish Speech Varieties in Southern Paraná: Linguistic Description and Confluences with Portuguese

Abstract

The State of Paraná in southern Brazil received thousands of Polish immigrants in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. Immigrants and their descendants main­tained and cultivated Polish culture in the new land, exemplified in architecture, food, artistry, religious rites and the use of Slavic language. Bilingualism was and is still greatly practiced in the region and it is still the native language of many descendants. This current investigation comprises two layers of linguistic research developed by UNICENTRO researchers linked to the Nucleus of Slavic Studies (NEES). On the one hand, the structure of the Polish variety spoken in the region is investigated, comprising phonetic details through an acoustic analysis with the software PRAAT. The research demonstrates that the language is not precisely that spoken currently in Poland, but was brought by immigrants a century ago and which differentiated itself throughout time due to contact with the Portuguese language. On the other hand, we investigated the features of speech by descendants of immigrants from the theoretical perspective of Labov’s quantitative socio-linguistics for possible contributions of Slavic languages, Polish and Ukrainian, on Portuguese in the region mentioned above. A database of Linguistic Varieties of Slavic Speech has been elaborated (VARLINFE).