Carioca - Sociolect

Sociolect

The Portuguese spoken across the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, as well neighboring towns in Minas Gerais and in the city of Florianópolis, has similar features, little distinctive from each other, so that cities as Paraty, Resende, Juiz de Fora, Campos dos Goytacazes, Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Vila Velha and Linhares may be said to sport the same dialect together with Rio de Janeiro, as they will hardly be perceived as strong regional variants by people from other parts of Brazil.

The Brazilian Portuguese variant spoken in the city of Rio de Janeiro (and metropolitan area) is called carioca, and it is called sotaque locally, a word literally translated as "accent". It can be said that Rio de Janeiro presents a sociolect inside the major fluminense-capixaba dialect, as speakers inside the city may be easily recognizable more by their slang than the way the phonology of their speech, closer to the standard Brazilian Portuguese present in media than other variants. It is known for the first place of diffusion of several distinctive traits new to either variant (European or Brazilian) of the Portuguese language, most notably:

1. (for Brazilians) Coda /s/ and /z/ can be pronounced as palato-alveolar and, such as those of English, or alveolo-palatal and, such as those of Catalan. This trait is inherited from European Portuguese, and carioca shares it only with florianopolitano and some other fluminense accents. In the northern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, not all coda /s/ and /z/ become postalveolar – rhymes do not, for example.
2. (for Europeans) /ʁ/, as well what would be coda /ɾ/ (that is, when not pre-vocalic) in European Portuguese, may be realized as various voiceless and voiced guttural-like sounds, most often latter ones (unlike in other parts of Brazil), and many or most of them can be part of the phonetic repertory of a single speaker. Among them the velar and uvular fricative pairs, as well both glottal transitions, the voiceless pharyngeal fricative and the uvular trill i.e., (between vowels), and . This diversity of allophones of a single rhotic phoneme is rare among not just Brazilian Portuguese, but also among major world languages.
3. (for both) The consonants /t/ and /d/ before /i/ or final unstressed /ɛ ~ e/ (, that in this position may be either raised to or deleted) become affricates and (again, as those of English or Catalan, depending on speaker), respectively. This is now common place in Brazilian Portuguese.
4. (for both) Historical (/l/ in syllable coda), that merged with coda /ɾ/ in caipira, had gone labialization to, and then vocalized to ; Nevertheless, with the exception of be the one used in Southern Brazil and São Paulo instead of, both commonly transcribed as, this process is now nearly ubiquitous in Brazilian Portuguese, so that only some areas retain velarized lateral alveolar approximant (rural areas close to the frontier with Uruguay) or postalveolar approximant (very few caipira areas at present day) as coda /l/.

These traits (particularly the chiado, i.e. postalveolar pronunciation of coda «s» and «z», and affricate pronunciation and and «te» and «de» rhymes) were once specifically characteristic of Rio de Janeiro speech, and distinguished particularly from the pronunciation of São Paulo and areas further south, which formerly had none of these characteristics. The chiado is thought to date from the early 1800s occupation of the city by the Portuguese royal family (as European Portuguese had similar characteristic of use of the postalveolar codas), while the affricates and are known to have originated in early 20th-century Rio de Janeiro speech. More recently, however, all of these traits have spread throughout much of the country due to the cultural influence of the city. As said above, affrication is at day widespread, if not nearly omnipresent among young Brazilians, while "guttural R" is also found country-wide, although to a way lesser extent among speakers in the 5 southernmost states other than Rio de Janeiro. The postalveolar coda has the least national presence and prestige, although it is found in other areas as well, e.g. coastal Northeast (though never as rhymes) and the areas near to Belém, Pará.

Another common characteristic of carioca speech is, in a stressed final rhyme, the addition of /j/ before coda /s/ (e.g. mas, dez may become, which can also be noted ambiguously as, ). This change may have originated in the Northeast, where pronunciations such as Jesus have long been heard.

There are some grammatical characteristics of this sociolect as well, an important one is the mixing of second person pronouns você and tu, even in the same speech. For instance, while normative Portuguese requires lhe as oblique for você, and te as oblique for tu, in carioca slang the once formal você (now widespread as informal pronoun in many Brazilian Portuguese varieties) is used for all cases. In informal speech, the pronoun tu is retained, but with the verb forms belonging to the form você: Tu foi na festa? (Did you go to the party?); so the verbal forms are the same for both você and tu.

Many cariocas, as well as many paulistas (from the coast, capital city or hinterland), will shorten "você", using "cê" instead: "Cê vai pra casa agora?" (Are you going home now?), this practice, however, is only on the spoken language, it is usually not written this way.

Slang words among youngsters from Rio de Janeiro include caraca! (gosh!), e aê? and qualé/quaé/coé? (whuzzup?), and maneiro (cool, fine, interesting, amusing) and sinistro (in standard Portuguese, "sinister"; in slang, "awesome", "terrific", but also "terrible," "troublesome", "frightening", "weird"). Many of these slang words can be found in practically all of Brazil, due again to cultural influence from the city.