Alia efekto estas ke kiam brazilanoj auxdas vortoj kiel: manero, mané, porra, já é, partiu playboy, demoro kaj la aliaj el karioka dialekto el portugala, kiel vi nomis gxin, sonas kiel la karioka ulo kiu parolas ilin ne respektas vin, ke li/sxi estas tre konvinkoplena kaj bezonas grandan spacon por montri ke tiu cxiu ulo gravas pli ol aliaj (portugale, li or sxi estas folgado/a).

Mi intervujis plimalpli 200 brazilanoj kiuj logxas en Dublino pri tio kaj 100% sentis tion. Ili estis el diversaj partoj el Brazilo (Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Distrito Federal, Bahia, São Paulo, Pará, Tocantins etc), sed cxiuj sentas la saman. Estrange, cxu ne? 100%!

Kiam mi demandis “kiu brazila acxento vi tute na sxatus havi kiel la via?” 100% diris: karioka acxento.

Mi ne scias se tiu cxi opinio gravas al viaj sercxoj pri lingvoj al en tiu cxi speciala kazo, portugala lingvo, sed jen mia kontribuo.

Gxis. Salutas Vin, Dominique, Brazilano el Dublino.

I am from Rio Grande do Sul, and while this is true for the inner accents of RS, this “alçamento” is present in the accent of the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre. (Though I guess it is less prominent than in RIo de Janeiro.)

Eu também gosto muito do assunto e no momento estou me concentrando no francês e dando umas olhadelas no japonês.

Morei no Rio por 1 ano e alguma coisa e você não poderia ter resumido melhor o “carioquêixxx”. Rererererere… Só uma outra observação: a palavra “porra” no Rio é também usada como vírgula. ))

Já adicionei seu blog na minha lista de favoritos.

Tudibom!

Interesting! One thing I've heard constantly when learning Japanese is to use a constant pitch and not go up-down all the time like we do in English.

Great post! I love the Carioca accent and it drives my wife insane because she is Paulistano. You've given me more ammo to torture her more Seriously, it is amazing how different the sotaque paulista and sotaque carioca are given how close they are geographically. Do you agree?

I'm Priscila and I'm in charge of bab.la's twitter account. As we're mutually following each other there, I ended up stopping by to read your blog. I'm Brazilian and loved this post about Portuguese! I love languages and have studied English, Spanish and a bit of German, but I had never thought about the way a foreigner learns my own language. Well done!!

By the way, I hope you received my answers to your online questionnaire. Enjoy your (short) time back home and…see you in 2010 (hopefully)!

Since I'm just randomly and informally stumbling through languages, I keep forgetting that people have studied these kinds of differences for hundreds of years, and that there are technical words for all of them! Thanks for sharing This “Alçamento das vogais” as a formal concept is not new to me, since it is part of formal Catalan that unstressed “o”s are always pronounced as “u”s. Apart from the ends of words, that was never indicated to me in Portuguese courses. Good to know it's not just unique to Rio!

Found that imaginary line theory fascinating!! Thanks for sharing the facts and history behind my some points on my list

I would just slightly disagree with you on unstressed “e”s changing to “i”s. I took a few lessons from Portuguese teachers to help me really work on some hard points and a music teacher (I prefer music teachers to language teachers at this stage) assured me that most unstressed “e”s are pronounced like the English i (like sin, pit etc.) would be and not the “ee” sound suggested by “i” (at least, this is the case in Rio). I could hear this difference myself. So she would say m[i]ninu (English “ih”) and not m(i)ninu (Portuguese “i”). These sounds are close though. Perhaps in other parts of Brazil this is true.

Thanks again for the interesting comment!

“I found out that (at least in the Carioca dialect) some unstressed os in other syllables also become u. So bonito is pronounced “buni(e)tu”, dormir is durmir etc.” This phenomenon is referred to in Portuguese as “Alçamento das vogais” by linguists and can be found at least to some extent in the speech of many – or possibly most – other Brazilians, even outside Rio or indeed the Southeast. It is not limited to the vowel “o”, but also affects e's, which often sound “i” in pretonic – and sometimes even posttonic – syllables as a result. Ex.: “menino” is pronounced “mininu”, “perigo” sounds “pirigu”, “Ceará” is “Siará”, “fêmea” becomes “femia” etc.

“Before Rio, I had spent more time in the Northeast, where there was a preference for open vowels, while in the south/southeast of Brazil, they prefer closed ones. So it’s pronounced dêzembro in the South/Southeast and dézembro in the northeast”.
You may find it interesting to know that there exists in fact an imaginary line running across Brazil which effectively splits the country into two major dialect areas: a northern and a southern half, with pretonic o's and e's being often open north of this linguistic boundary and invariably closed below it. This rough dialect map of Brazil was first drawn by Brazilian linguist Antenor Nascentes back in the 1950s, when he identified opening of pretonic vowels as the main speech feature clearly distinguishing northern dialects from southern ones.