Língua de herança: a preservação e mobilização de aspectos fonético-fonológicos da língua portuguesa adquirida na infância

Abstract

The theme of this research is Portuguese as a heritage language. Heritage language is defined here as a language which is naturally acquired in early childhood, in a context of migration, whose use is restricted to the family, while the child also acquires the majority language. The study’s objective was to determine to what extent adult heritage speakers preserve and mobilize the phonetic-phonological features of the language to which they were exposed in early childhood. The investigation was conducted under the theoretical approach of Sociolinguistics (Görski; Paza, 2024) and based on basic assumptions of articulatory phonetics (Cristófaro Silva, 2003, 2005), phonological processes (Callou; Leite, 1990), and dialectal variation at the phonetic and phonological level of Brazilian Portuguese (Câmara Jr, 1999). Through an experimental approach and qualitative data analysis (Denzin; Lincoln, 2006), we analyzed the oral production of Brazilian Portuguese heritage speakers and of one of their parents, in an expansion of the previous work of Weiss, Fonseca, and Candian (2018) and Weiss and Candian (2019). Initially, to understand the linguistic background from the perspective of both children and parents, we used online questionnaires; following that, the experimental study was conducted, which consisted in the realization of elicited production tasks. Data were submitted to auditory analysis and perceptual judgment. The results indicated that heritage speakers have preserved and mobilized phonetic and phonological features of the heritage language acquired in childhood, since they showed both characteristics common to all Brazilian Portuguese dialects and aspects specific to the inherited dialectal variety, including those not used in the phonetic inventory of their native language. Primarily because the storage and recall of this type of information occur unconsciously and automatically, based on stimuli and repetition training, we relate this articulatory capacity to produce the sounds of language to procedural memory, also called implicit or non-declarative memory (Izquierdo, 2006; Ullman, 2004; Baddeley; Anderson; Eysenck, 2011), which we named phonetic-phonological memory. Besides phonological competence, evidenced by the phonetic-phonological aspects identified, other characteristics of the phenomenon were verified in the participants’ production, such as the natural fluency of connected speech and discursive, pragmatic, and interactional competence. It was verified that the benefits of maintaining a heritage language are substantial and longlasting, not only for identity and cultural reasons, but also for the benefits of having a linguistic resource available to be used when needed, especially if the migration project is marked by a return (voluntary or not) to the family's country of origin. The conclusions and contributions of this work, additionally, are applicable to other heritage languages despite our focus being on Brazilian Portuguese.