Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Young Learners and Phonological Variation in the Portuguese Mesolect of Cape Verde |
| Paper URL: | http://www.phil.muni.cz/linguistica/art/neves/nev-001.pdf |
| Author: | Ana Cristina Neves |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | University of Saint Joseph |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Phonology; Sociolinguistics |
| Subject Language: |
Portuguese
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| Abstract: |
Only limited sociolinguistic research which takes special account of young learners has been carried out on creole contexts. In the case of Cape Verde, phonetic descriptions of the several varieties within the Capeverdean Language (CVL) have been reported by Cardoso (1989), Veiga (1982, 1996a, 2000) and Quint (2000a). This last author does refer to the mesolectal spectrum of Cape Verde, but there are no sociolinguistic surveys on young learners.
The subject under study is set between the Capeverdean language (CVL) and standard European Portuguese (EP); it is the indigenized variety (IV) of Portuguese spoken in Cape Verde by children aged 8-16 at school, a mesolectal element in this linguistic continuum. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the acquisition of sounds which undergo phonological variation among young learners. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the field of phonology is more susceptible to the horizontal continuum, i.e., between regions and islands, than to the vertical one, which is related to pupils' age and cognitive development. Tokens with /r/ and vowels prove to be more sensitive to phonological variation with effects on territorial delimitation. Interestingly, the geographical continuum of this IV at this stage does not correspond to the conventional division of the Cape Verdean language into northern and southern varieties. Instead, a division between western and eastern islands has emerged. |
| Type: | Individual Paper |
| Status: | Completed |
| URL: | http://www.phil.muni.cz/linguistica/art/neves/nev-001.pdf |
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