BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY IN THE TOWN OF PRANCHITA-PR

The study of beliefs and attitudes has been increasingly valued in the field of modern Sociolinguistics, as, by means of such data, it is possible to clarify phenomena that cannot be explained only by the linguistic context. In relation to that, another factor is extremely important for the analysis of facts connected with language: the appraising attitudes that each speaker attributes to his/her speech and to the other varieties present in the area. This is the reason why the object of study in this work is the beliefs and attitudes of the speakers from the town of Pranchita-PR. Therefore, this work aims at (i) verifying its inhabitants’ opinions concerning the varieties present in the area; (ii) describing and analyzing the speakers’ feelings and opinions in relation to the language of the neighboring country, Argentina. With approximately six thousand inhabitants, Pranchita is ethnically constituted by descendants from several nationalities: Italians, Germans, Polish, Spanish, besides the fact it is on the border with Argentina.  The corpus of this work consists of oral records collected within the scope of the interinstitutional Project Linguistic Beliefs and Attitudes: a study of the relationship between Portuguese and other contact languages, whose informants were divided according to sex, age and school level. Overall, 17 interviews were analyzed by using, as theoretical basis, the works by Labov (1972), López Morales (1993), Moreno Fernández (1998) among others.