Contrasting Age Of Arrival And Length Of Residence In Dialect Contact

Abstract

This paper reports on the analysis of a corpus built to disentangle the effects of Age of Arrival (AoA) and Length of Residence (LoR) in the dialect contact situation of rural Northeastern migrants living in São Paulo/Brazil, whose speech differs both in Northeastern/Southeastern and rural/urban traits. Mixed-effects models of four sociolinguistics variables–(i) coda /r/ (porta ‘door’); (ii) /t,d/ before [i] (tia ‘aunt’); (iii) sentential negation (não vi/não vi não ‘I haven’t seen’); and (iv) nominal agreement (os menino-s/menino-ø ‘the boys’)–show that AoA correlates only with the phonetic variables and LoR correlates only with coda /r/. Self-reported “identity” indices align with the variables’ geographical distribution, correlating with coda /r/ and negation (the Northeastern/Southeastern variables) and but not with /t,d/ and nominal agreement (the rural/urban variables). Thus, while AoA and LoR distinguish phonetic and morphosyntactic variables, dialect acquisition also involves a complex web of differently defined regional and individual identities.

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