A variação fonológica da nasal palatal na fala dos estudantes da Universidade Federal de Sergipe: um estudo sociolinguístico

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the variation in the realization of the palatal nasal /ɲ/ in the speech of students at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), in words such as dinheiro, ganha, minha, amanhã. Inserted in the theoretical framework of Variational Sociolinguistics and anchored in the problem of embedding (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006), the study is confirmatory in nature and seeks to verify whether the behavior of this segment in the university context aligns with the patterns described in previous studies (Soares, 2008; Pinheiro, 2009; Gamba, 2015; Pedrosa, 2016; Vieira, 2017; Miranda, 2021), with special attention to the preceding and following phonetic contexts. The analyzed corpus consists of 7,618 occurrences of the palatal nasal, extracted from sociolinguistic interviews from the 2020 Deslocamentos sample of the Falares Sergipanos Database (Siqueira; Freitag, 2025). The realizations were categorized in a binary manner, distinguishing between the consonantal variant [ɲ] and the vocalic variant [ỹ], based on auditory analysis. Linguistic conditioners (previous and subsequent phonetic context, tonicity, and grammatical class) and social conditioners (participant gender, course duration, and geographical displacement) were controlled. The results indicate a predominance of the consonantal variant, which corresponds to 61.68% of the occurrences analyzed. Among linguistic conditioners, the preceding and following phonetic contexts are the most explanatory: low vowels [a] contribute to greater occurrences of the consonantal variant, while higher vowels [o], [ɔ], [e], [u], [i] contribute to the application of the vocalic variant. The variables tonicity and grammatical class had low explanatory power, with secondary effects dependent on the distribution of preceding and following phonetic contexts, i.e., they are superimposed. At the social level, course duration had no significant effect, participant gender had a moderate effect, and in terms of geographical displacement, students from displacement I were the ones who used the consonantal variant the most. It is concluded that the variation of the palatal nasal at UFS is mostly consonantal and sensitive mainly to phonetic-articulatory conditioners, confirming, in general terms, trends already described in the literature, albeit with local specificities. The study highlights the relevance of confirmatory approaches and the careful selection of measurement levels for refining the description of phonetic-phonological variation in Brazilian Portuguese.