Maria Clotilde Almeida (FLUL/CLUL) / Nuno Nabais

Varieties of Portuguese in Contact: further evidence from Facebook

Key-words: Varieties of Portuguese in contact; Portuguese "youngspeak"; African varieties of Portuguese; Portuguese on the Facebook.

Although influences of African varieties of Portuguese on European Portuguese "youngspeak" have been dealt with by Almeida (2008a), (2008b) e (2011) by means of a socio-semantic analysis of bué and lá, on TV serials for Portuguese youngsters or across digital platforms, need arises to consider the phenomenon of the widespread usage of expressions from African varieties of Portuguese from a broader perspective.
Influences of African varieties of Portuguese on European Portuguese that have been taking place since the last quarter of the 20th century by language contact between people coming from Portuguese ex-colonies, speaking Angolan or Mozambican Portuguese and European Portuguese speakers, mainly in Lisbon's surroundings and in the Almada region, on the left bank of the Tagus river.
However, the consolidated usage of Portuguese African variety expressions in digital European Portuguese, as evidences collected from the BICA-corpus, an SMS corpus in European Portuguese, (Almeida/Sousa 2015a, 2015b), as well as from digital platforms of "charroque-telepartners" (Silva 2011), leads us to believe that the phenomenon has been spreading in recent times. Hence, we aim to investigate the influence of African varieties of Portuguese on European Portuguese by analyzing communication exchanges on the Facebook. The fact that a wider spectrum of speakers with different backgrounds, age and gender actively engage in communicative exchanges in the Facebook medium allows us to gather sufficient evidence to portray this phenomenon both in a thorough and comprehensive mode.

References
Almeida, M.C. (2008a), "Youngspeak, subjectification and Language Change: the case of bué" In: Questions on Language Change (M. C. Almeida et al., eds.), Lisboa: Colibri, 117-132.
Almeida, M.C. (2008b), "la: ein "deutsches" Wort in der portugiesischen Jugendsprache -wie so?" In: Revista de Estúdios Filológicos Alemanes 15/2008, 221-232.
Almeida, M.C. {2011) „lá-bué-shotgun-matrix : a (small) roadmap to European Portuguese Youngspeak In:   Línguas Pluricêntricas. Variação Linguística e Dimensões
Sociosemânticas/Pluricentric Languages. Linguistic Variation and Sociocognitive Dimensions, (a. S. Silva et al. eds.) Braga: Aletheia, 627-638.
Almeida, M.C. (2013), "Disfemismos vs. Eufemismos nas Linguagens dos Jovens em Portugal" In: Portugiesisch ais Diasytem/O Português como Diassistema (A. Merlan/J. Schmidt-Radefeldt, hrsg.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 71-82.