"But are you Portuguese or Brazilian?" Individual factors and phonological influence in the contact between varieties of Portuguese

Abstract

In a context of contact between dialects, it will not be strictly necessary, at first, the acquisition of the other variety for communication to be successful; even so, Kupisch et al. (2023) report that, in their Accent Rating Task, European Portuguese (EP) evaluators of audio snippets of Brazilian immigrants who arrived in Portugal at adult age were less sure of these immigrants’ origins than they were in their evaluation of audio snippets of non-immigrants, which indicates that acquiring certain phonological properties of a second dialect is possible. However, the authors did not cross these results with individual factors that are traditionally considered in second dialect acquisition (SDA), given the expressive variability in the outcomes of this process (Siegel, 2010). Therefore, audio snippets of 30 immigrants who had been living in continental Portugal for over six years (as well as of 8 Brazilian and 12 Portuguese non-immigrants who served as control groups) were evaluated by 47 EP natives, who determined if the speakers sounded Brazilian or Portuguese and how certain they were of their evaluation by means of a Likert-like scale from 1 (Brazilian: I’m sure) to 6 (Portuguese: I’m sure). Results resembled Kupisch et al.’s (2023), since the evaluators easily identified Brazilian (M = 1.17) and Portuguese (M = 5.95) controls; Brazilian immigrants, on the other hand, were, in general, identified as Brazilians, but with a significantly lower level of certainty (M = 1.88, p <.001) comparing with non-immigrants. An analysis of individual factors showed that age of arrival, exposure to EP at home, and the will to be perceived as Portuguese, as well as the interaction between this variable and the motivation to speak EP, were statistically significant (ps ≤.017). Nonetheless, individual analyses does not indicate many effects of linearity between variables and evaluations. This suggests that the weight of each variable at an individual level will be different, which helps to explain the different outcomes seen in SDA.