Celeste Rodrigues  / Conceição PAVIA
University of Lisbon, Portugal

Attitudes towards standard European Portuguese - Braga speakers

There are few studies addressing attitudes towards linguistic varieties of European Portuguese (EP) (but see Cabeleira 2006), although the topic has a long tradition in other languages. Portuguese is a pluricentric language, with varieties having their own standards: EP, Brazilian Portuguese (BP), and emerging standards in Mozambique and Angola (Castro 2006), among others.

According to Cintra's (1972) proposal EP has two groups of dialects in the mainland: central-southern dialects (CSEP) and northern dialects (NEP), basically defined on phonological grounds. Lisbon dialect (SEP) is generally assumed as the EP standard. SEP is closer   to CSEP than to NEP in many phonological features, even though it   does not have   several features of CSEP. However, SEP shares some features with NEP that are absent from CSEP. This might be due either to NEP's influence or simply to the fact that SEP derives historically from NEP. Common phonological features between SEP and  CSEP include:   the deletion of the dorsal glide    in the diphthong /oU/-[o], the categorical presence of  /v/ instead of /(3/,    the presence    of /s/ and /z/ alone instead of having also the apical fricatives, for instance. SEP, in turn, shows some typical features of NEP, e.g. the centralization of the stressed /e/-[e], the presence of the diphthong /el/-[ej] and the strengthening of /r/-[r] in onset, thus, separating SEP from the linguistic area where it geographically belongs.

Does NEP have a non-dominant standard? Which dialect from NEP is it? Are phonological features more important to establish the standard than other linguistic features (e.g. syntactical)? It is not obvious that it must be so. NEP covers approximately 50% of mainland Portugal, and it is the most populated area of the country.

With the increasing development of the cultural and economic tissue of population of this area, a question arises: do NEP speakers feel comfortable with the fact that SEP is considered as the standard? NEP speakers often show linguistic behaviour and attitudes towards language use that might be understood as a deliberate option to accord the status of a different standard to their own dialect. Signs of this questioning can be seen in the judgements produced in the sociolinguistic interviews of the recently made available corpus PSFB (Barbosa 2014). The PSFB interactions involve two speakers in semi-informal speech style. The interviewer (either a young linguist speaker of NEP or of CSEP) introduces new topics to assure that the interviewee speaks as freely as possible. The last topic of the conversation in most cases is related to linguistic evaluation, concerning often the variety spoken in Braga's region and SEP. Thus, we will describe and discuss the dialectal evaluation produced in this stratified corpus of 80 interviews to Braga native speakers (NEP), since the attitudes towards EP