The Deletion Of Postonic Medial Vowel In Two African Varieties Of Portuguese: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The deletion of the medial postonic vowel, a process that culminates the regularization of proparoxytone words to the paroxitone pattern, is an old phenomenon in Portuguese. Gomes (2012), in a variationist analysis that contrasts the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) with the European Portuguese (EP), finds that in the EP erasure rule is more frequent than in the BP, a variety that can be consi-dered conservative in terms of the configuration of the systems vowels, given the variation that still occurs in the context of the realization of the medium vowels in the unstressed pretonic context and the negative social valuation to which vowel deletion is subject. Gomes (no prelo), in a comparison between BP, EP and São Tomé Portuguese (STP), identifies in this a very particular behavior: high vowel deletion index in the postonic medial context, probably a reflection of the influence of creole that coexists with Portuguese in the area of data collection. This paper proposes a comparison between the informants of the first São Tomé age group with data from individuals of the same profile extracted from the Portuguese Mozambican corpus (collected in Maputo in 2016). In Mozambique, Portuguese coexists with a wide variety of languages of the Bantu family. The hypothesis is that proparoxytones, unnatural even for speakers of Portuguese as L1 and that are not immersed in multilingual contexts, would be regularized to