A preposição ‘ni’ no continuum rural-urbano de Comunidades Baianas

Abstract

This study has the main objective to investigate the replacement of the preposition in by ni, fairly frequent phenomenon in speech and sometimes in writing. From comparisons between varieties of Portuguese (Brazil and Africa), it is conjectured that this morphological change has to do with influences from some African languages which had contact with the Portuguese in the period of colonization / exploration of these places. In addition, note that the use of ni is performed by speakers from rural and urban, there is the hypothesis that possibly there is a continuum that explain its dissemination in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus, from the quantitative methodology Labovian inspiration, we analyze speech from the Portuguese rural, popular and cult of Feira de Santana to evaluate the hypothesis of a rural-urban continuum, taking into account the use of this morphological trait . The results of the rounds indicate that the rural Portuguese and worship favor the use of ni with the relative weighting of .65 and .52, respectively. The relative weight of .33 of popular Portuguese factor, in turn, indicates that this variety does not favor implementation of this variant. The fact that there are so discrepant values among them is explained from the historical and social characteristics of each language community. But what draws the most attention in this research is the analysis of the results of the linguistic variables corroborate the idea of a relationship between the Portuguese of Brazil and some African languages with regard to the use of ni.