NINETEENTH CENTURY BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: LETTERS FROM THE BARONESS OF GUARAÚNA AND THE EMPRESS THEREZA

 1 Doutora em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa pela Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho", campus de Araraquara (1998). Professora Associado A, no Departamento de Letras Vernáculas da Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa. Atua no Mestrado em Linguagem, Identidade e Subjetividade desde 03/2010. 2 Mestranda em Estudos da Linguagem pela Universidade Estadual de Londrina (2012). Bolsista CAPES. Especialista em Língua, Linguística e Literatura pela Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (2010) e graduada em Letras Português/Inglês pela mesma instituição (2006). As with societies, history and culture, language also evolves, a process which is inherent to it. The Portuguese of Brazil has its own characteristics due to the influence of Indian, African peoples and others who have lived here. This study researched 19th century handwritten letters for the origins of Brazilian Portuguese. The corpus consists of three personal letters collected by the Museu do Tropeiro in Castro. Two of them were written by the Baroness of Guaraúna and one by the Empress Thereza de Bourbon. This textual genre is Revista Línguas & Letras ISSN: 1517-7238 Vol. 13 nº 24 1º Sem. 2012 a valuable source for socio-historical studies because it brings, through the linguistic register, an immeasurable cultural and intellectual legacy. Studying the educated Portuguese Brazilian language, used informally between 1880 and 1893, one is able to notice syntactic phenomena, which are found in forms of treatment and spelling diversity characteristic of the century in which they were written. Our focus was not to exhaust all the possibilities of analysis and observation on the origin of this entire legacy but to contribute towards the studies of the history of Brazilian Portuguese, and in particular, the one from the state of Paraná.