Linguistic interference in the contact between Chinese and Brazilians in the city of São Paulo: an ethnographic approach

• Grant number: 22/09601-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: March 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
• Principal Investigator: Livia Oushiro
• Grantee: Ruizhi Zhu
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research proposes to investigate the interference of Chinese on the Portuguese spoken by Chinese immigrants in the city of São Paulo, aiming to 1) describe the multilingual and multidialectal situation of the Chinese immigrant community in São Paulo, in view of the possibility of language shift; 2) analyze three phenomena of Chinese interference on Portuguese, one lexical, one grammatical, and one phonic, based on the theoretical framework of Variationist Sociolinguistics. In order to put the research into practice, methods of ethnographic observation and recordings of sociolinguistic interviews will be used. The data collected throughout the research will be processed in ELAN and R. The proposed research will contribute to sociolinguistic contact studies by describing the multilingual and multidialectal situation of the Chinese community in São Paulo, and by interpreting qualitatively and quantitatively the patterns of acquisition and variation of Portuguese by immigrants, issues that have been little explored in Brazilian and Paulista Linguistics.