“MANO, PEGA A VISÃO”: CARACTERÍSTICAS DA FALA DOS JOVENS CONTEMPORÂNEOS NO ENSINO MÉDIO E OS PROCESSOS CRIATIVOS QUE CONSTITUEM A SUA VARIEDADE LINGUÍSTICA

Abstract

Over almost two decades of teaching Portuguese Language in the final grades of elementary school and, in particular, in secondary school, I have observed the way young people speak: expressions that suddenly appear and not long afterwards are no longer used. In my place of work, I have witnessed a cycle of the emergence, spread, disappearance and invention of terms, expressions, slang, acronyms, familiar words that take on new meanings... all being incorporated into the students' linguistic repertoire, which is why I considered it pertinent to study social linguistic variation, specifically that present in the speech of adolescents. Therefore, the theme of this work is adolescent speech as a linguistic variety that manifests itself in the school environment in their conversational interactions, and its main object is to investigate the characteristics of the speech of contemporary young people in secondary school, analyzing the creative processes that motivate linguistic variations in students' speech. The specific objectives of this research are: to develop and apply, in the first year of secondary school, a didactic sequence based on the theme “Linguistic Variation”; to survey the linguistic variants used by the young people taking part in the research, through the application of the didactic sequence in Portuguese language classes; to identify the linguistic processes used to create words or expressions mentioned by these young people and to identify linguistic variants used by the parents and/or grandparents of the students taking part in the research and the corresponding expressions used by the adolescents which possibly represent a generational variation or change. The data was generated through action research in two first-year high school classes at a state school in the city of Campo Grande, MS. Although the corpus was generated in a specific school and the participants are a small portion of the students enrolled (around 60 students), I believe that this group of young people can represent the speech community of adolescents in general, as a social group of the same age group, which has very similar characteristics in the way they speak. Anchored in the perspectives of Variationist Sociolinguistics proposed by Labov (2008 [1972]), the research is also based on Bagno's (2014) reflections on changes and variations in language, the Pedagogy of Linguistic Variation defended by BortoniRicardo (2004), the theory of linguistic diversity defended by Soares (2017), and the appreciation of diversity in language adopted by Hooks (2019). Through the application of a Didactic Sequence, I identified that the speech of adolescents is characterized by a peculiar linguistic repertoire that identifies and differentiates the social group from other groups, which is the result of several extralinguistic factors that interfere in the creative processes of the variants present in the vocabulary of this speech community, such as the fact that they are inserted in a society in which social and technological acceleration prevails, reflecting, for example, the shortening of words. In addition, digital media has influenced the incorporation of memes into young people's vocabulary and these carry one characteristic - ephemerality. The influence of the North American English language is also a relevant factor in the constitution of adolescents' linguistic repertoire, resulting in the foreignisms ingrained in the speech of this social group. Keywords: linguistic variations; adolescent speech; secondary school.