Rhotic consonants and variation in Santomean Portuguese

Abstract

We investigate the phonetic variants associated with European Portuguese’s rhotic phonemes /ʀ/ e /ɾ/ in Santomean Portuguese, a variety that presently constitutes the L1 of the majority of San Tomeans, and we discuss the linguistic and sociolinguistic variables that underlie the observed variation. In order to do so, we carried out phonetic transcription of excerpts from 9 spontaneous interviews with Santomean informants, who were recorded in San Tome in 2008 and 2012. The data were transcribed with the EXMARaLDA Partitur software, counted manually, and linguistically analysed. The findings were confronted with recent studies on rhotics in this variety. Our data confirm that the neutralization of the distinction between /ʀ/ and /ɾ/ is a tendency stabilizing in the younger age groups of the urban population of São Tomé (cf. Bouchard, 2017). In light of the overall results, we further propose that São Tomean Portuguese lacks a phonological distinction between /ʀ/ and /ɾ/ (cf. Brandão, 2016; Brandão et al., no prelo).