Aspectos linguísticos do guineense: reflexões acerca de uma língua

Abstract

The language is the important identity and cultural traits for his speakers, it records the history of a people. Guinean is a language that illustrates this aspect well, a language that comes from contact between Portuguese and some ethnic languages on the West African Coast and plays the role of the unity national language among the various ethnic groups that give rise the Guinea-Bissau population. This dissertation aims to describe the phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of Guinean people compared to Portuguese and four African ethnic languages: pepel, balanta, mandinga and mandjaco. To achieve this goal, the study was based on historical grammars about the changes suffered by words over time. Based on a literature review of the few studies that describe Guinean language, main aspects are presented may contribute to the description of that language and reflect on the needs theme in-depth study. To validate some phonetic data, a data instrument was developed based on the Phonetic-Phonological Questionnaire of the ALiB Project. The interviews were conducted with eight Guinean-speaking informants, four from higher education and four from high school. The interview was carried out remotely and in two ways: for the informants with full high school, the phonetic-phonological questionnaires were applied through the video call by the WhatsApp application, with due care in order to obtain the real data; for higher education students, questionnaires on morphosyntactic aspects were prepared and sent to answer by e-mail. The results pointed, regarding phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic aspects, to the fact that Guinean language is the result of the irregular linguistic process transmission (LUCCHESI; BAXTER, 2009) and, being a results of different languages, and is in the middle of these languages, that is, with regard to grammatical structure, it receives the same influence from portuguese and languages from Guinea-Bissau (COUTO, 1996). Likewise, it was found that the modern Guinean differs from the old one, pointing to the obsolescence on behalf of the old. In fact, it is concluded, through all the discussions in this dissertation, that the base of Guinean language is Portuguese and that the use of the term “Creole” to designate the language is inappropriate due to its stigmatizing character.