Nossa língua é o nosso sangue: percepção e identidade linguísticas das vogais médias pretônicas no contexto escolar pessoense

Abstract

The school, together with family environment, is an important space for socialization of human beings as citizens. In the school environment, students can, besides learning and delving into the contents, understand themselves as an active subject in society and (re)construct their identity(ies) – for example, the professional, gender, group and linguistic identities – from various relationships established with friends and teachers. In this sense, teachers have an important role, since, because they are in a “power” position, their words can exert influence, positively or not, on the construction of these identities. With teachers of Portuguese Language it would not be different. This research, therefore, aims at verifying whether speakers from João Pessoa, in the state of Paraíba, Brazil, have awareness of their dialect and identity with it, specifically in relation to pre-tonic mid-vowels (lowering is one of the indicators of the João Pessoa accent). The specific objectives are: i) to investigate, by means of acoustic perception of the mid-vowels /e, o/ in pre-tonic position (as in cevada “barley” and forrada “lined”), the dialectal awareness and linguistic identity of high school students in the speech community of João Pessoa - Paraíba; ii) to understand what aspects (formation, prescriptive documents and history of life) contribute to make teachers of Portuguese work with linguistic variation; iii) to explain actions related to the conduction of a work on linguistic variation, assuming, thus, the role of teachers of Portuguese Language in the construction of the dialectal awareness and linguistic identity of high school students in the above-mentioned speech community. Therefore, mostly based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, ([1966; 1972] 2008), ECKERT, 2012), Educational Sociolinguistics (BORTONI-RICARDO, 2004) and of the studies on identity (BAUMAN, 2005, MOITA LOPES, 2006; 2012, HALL, 2006), we discussed the works of description of Camara Jr (1970); of production, Yacovenco (1993) and Pereira (1997; 2010) and of perception, Schüller (2013) and Nascimento (2017). Three perception tests on the pre-tonic mid-vowels in the dialect of João Pessoa, Paraíba, were conducted with 70 students of a public school from João Pessoa and with a high school teacher of a public school of the state of Paraíba, which also participated in a semi-structured interview. The results from the perception tests indicate that the participants, both the high school students from João Pessoa and the collaborating teacher, have awareness on their dialect, as well as an identity with it. Regarding the interview, we verified that the affective relationship that the teacher has with the language and with the variant(s) that she uses reflects in her identity with the Portuguese language and with João Pessoa speech, influencing the way that she understands it(them) and teaches it(them). Furthermore, we could find that teachers‟ attention to linguistic diversity in classroom is crucial to conduct a reflective work on this diversity, contributing positively to the construction process of the linguistic identity of their students, and, thus, emancipating them and empowering them in relation to their own way of speaking.