Le lexique régional populaire du Ceará

The investigations carried out in the context of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil have revealed surprisingly strong lexical variation in the regional speech in the state of Ceará with important diachronic and diatopic dimensions. Building on the experience of the popular varieties of Portuguese as spoken in the North East of Brazil, in particular in the states of Paraíba and Ceará, where the author has been active over a long period, it is possible to distinguish between what is regional, what is popular and what is evidence of creativity, not only in the writing of authors but also for speakers in general. The answers to these questions are often difficult to interpret or even ambiguous, since every speaker uses these functions in each act of discourse, mixing, inserting, giving more emphasis to one or the other, but always in view to convince, co-opt, manipulate the person he or she is talking or writing to. Around a dozen dictionaries, word lists or glossaries on cearês (or the Ceará variety of Portuguese) have been published over the last two years, showing the range of lexical variation not only for Ceará but for the North East in general. In the examples included in the article there are cases of lexical and semantic neologisms, the emergence of new terms through phonetic modification, as well as changes in the usage of terms already consigned to normative dictionaries but with a different meaning, and words not generally present in the dictionaries of popular regional Ceará dictionaries, and not attested in discourse. All these terms are diatopic variants in Ceará, or diastratic, used by less educated classes, or diaphrastic, representatative of the style of an author or an age group of the population, and the three types of variants coexist, and are reinforced or not, all the time, in regard not only to the linguistic context but more particularly to the extralinguistic context in which they are produced.