Um estudo do português popular brasileiro em cartas pessoais de “mãos cândidas” do sertão baiano

Abstract

The location and publication of 91 personal letters written during the century XX by 43 inlanders from the rural area of the Bahian semiarid intend to contribute to the sociohistorical linguistic study of the popular Brazilian Portuguese. The available corpus is a rare documentation. The Historical Linguistic recognizes the importance of the identification of texts that are a reflexion of a daily writing. Those texts present data that are very similar to the vernacular, a product of social subordinate groups that had little access to the schooling. The contextualization of the sample, based on the data of the external dimension of the writing, is carried out from the identification of the ways of circulation, of the time and spatial location of the documents, as well as of the biographical profile of the senders and addressees. The investigation of a set of linguistic properties that is in the documents offers some evidences to realize that Bahian inlanders, senders of the letters, are individuals that are little familiarized with the writing, and the emphasis, then, is for the signs that they show up in their “unskilled hands”. In this sense, the description of some marks of incompetence in the writing is showed: subgraphic and paleographic aspects; graphic segmentation; repetition; aspects of acquisition of the writing, including spellings for complex syllables, “dazzled” representation of the writing, representation of the nasalization; representation of digraphs and phonic phenomena. This set of characteristics supplies traces to recognize the sample as representative of the popular dialect of Brazilian Portuguese.