Atlas lingüístico do município de Ponta Porã - MS: um registro das línguas em contato na fronteira do Brasil com o Paraguai

Abstract

Among the sciences that deal with the study of linguistic variation there is Dialectology, centred in the description of regional differences in speech. With Dialectology comes Geolinguistics as a method of cartographic registration of linguistic varieties collected in speech. This study aimed at the registry of the oral form in the variant found in the Portuguese of Mato Grosso do Sul state - in the municipality of Ponta Porã - through a linguistic atlas, besides the documentation of possible linguistic changes in the spoken language and the registration of conservative marks and of bilingualism in the languages in contact (Portuguese, Spanish and Guarani) on the border. The choice of such location considered both the historical and geographical importance of Ponta Porã, municipality situated on the dry border between Brazil and Paraguay, being part of the set where the War of Paraguay (1864-1870) took place, a factor that generates intense cultural and linguistic exchange in this strip of territory, giving it typical features, specially in spoken language, distinct from other regions in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Besides that, the location is a point of enquiry for two other projects: the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil and the Linguistic Atlas of Mato Grosso do Sul. The theoretical-methodological basis for the research is centred in the fundaments of Dialectology and Geolinguistics. The network gathered eight locations - seven in the interior of the municipality and the headquarters, distributed from north to south and from east to west. For defining such network the following criteria were considered: i) the demographic density of the municipality; ii) its historical and geographical importance; iii) the situation of languages in contact manifested on the border. The interviews were performed with the help of a semantic-lexical linguistic questionnaire that contains 260 questions and 2 narratives, with two informants in each locality - one male and one female - in the age group of 45-70 years old, illiterate or exposed to very little formal education, with Paraguayan ancestry, bilingual and living in such location for over twenty years. The final product of such research resulted in the Linguistic Atlas of Ponta Porã - MS: a register of languages in contact on the border of Brazil and Paraguai - ALiPP, that contains 232 lexical cartographic sheets. The research documented a strong influence of Guarani as the native tongue on the border, which supplanted to the use of Spanish, the transplanted language; the intertwining of Portuguese with the languages from the border generating a high incidence of hybrid terms based on Portuguese, Guarani and Spanish, such as estrella guia (= guiding star: Spanish/Portuguese) or arroyo yrembe'y (= river bank: Spanish/Guarani), besides regionalisms and archaisms such as ikoe, ikõm, melizzo and gêmeas (= twins, for bananas stuck together in Guarani, Guarani, Spanish and Portuguese, respectively). These languages are strongly intertwined, thus giving peculiar characteristics to the local speech employed in this area, its registration reveals a multicultural world and reflects the bilingualism that comes from linguistic contacts that certainly exceed political-administrative boundaries.