Datapoint Diu Indo-Portuguese/Social variation: phonology

From a social point of view, the native-speaker community of Diu Indo-Portuguese is comparatively homogeneous. Still, one of the most obvious indicators of social prestige is fluency in Standard Portuguese. The corpus contains some striking examples of variation along these lines which, in fact, pertain more to the domain of phonetic realisation than that of phonological representation. One of these involves the realisation of syllable-final, word-internal voiceless fricatives, which can be: (1) alveloar [s] (the most common in Diu Indo-Portuguese); or (2) post-alveolar [ʃ] (modelled on a relatively recent trend in Standard Portuguese):

(1) [iskɔl] 'school'

(2) [iʃkɔl] 'school'

This type of variation is particularly evident when addressing a foreigner or someone perceived as highly educated in Standard Portuguese. The extent to which such variation carries over to conversations among native speakers of Diu Indo-Portuguese, or which settings would trigger it, remain to be described.

Values

Limited

Confidence:
Certain