Perception of sociolinguistic variation: the social evaluation of the alternation between the final unstressed nasal diphthong and oral vowel in the Carioca variety

Abstract

One of the issues in the study of linguistic variation and change concerns the social evaluation of variants. This article focuses on the dynamics of linguistic variation in the speech community of Rio de Janeiro, focusing on the evaluation of variants of the alternation between the final unstressed nasal diphthong and the oral vowel. The social evaluation of the variants was accessed through an experiment using the matched-guise technique. The experiment involved presenting participants with oral stimuli, that is vehicle sentences containing a lexical item with the variants of the variable. The task consisted in associating the stimulus heard with one of the two photos presented afterwards, characterizing the speaker of the sentence based on socioeconomic status. No participant heard the same lexical item with both variants. Furthermore, speaker’s gender was a between-subjects condition. The objective of the experiment was to verify to what extent there is a tendency to associate each variant with a certain social profile to access the social value of the variants and whether structural conditioning affects perception. The experiment was applied to twenty-three participants and the responses were subjected to statistical treatment using mixed models. The results showed that the oral vowel variant does not index low socioeconomic status in the carioca variety, which confirms the linguistic marker nature of the variable in question. It was also observed an effect of linguistic conditioning on the limit of significance.