As práticas e técnicas de suavização de sotaque no português brasileiro como tentativa de homogeneizar o uso da língua

Abstract

Brazil is a multilingual country where the Portuguese language is spoken throughout the national territory. Because of its large territorial dimension and the historical colonization factors, the Portuguese language has differentiated itself throughout history and assumed typical regional characteristics that give it phonemic, lexical, melodic and structural particularities. The Portuguese speaker in Brazil can easily recognize which region is another speaker regardless of the geographical distance in which two speakers live. Brazilian Portuguese in its immense variety gives different accents to speakers from different regions of Brazil and the smoothing or neutralizing of accents appears as an attempt to homogenize the speech of the Portuguese language throughout the territory and from the 1950s onwards it began to be implemented especially for communication professionals. Currently, with the advent of media culture, this proposal has reached other groups of speakers, further promoting the linguistic prejudice that already has large proportions in Brazil. This dissertation was prepared through a bibliographical research, investigating the current practices of smoothing or neutralizing of the accent in Brazilian Portuguese and publications related to the subject from the 1930s onwards. The material found was compiled and described in a set of techniques that organize the practice and discussed from a sociolinguistic view that understands language as a social phenomenon.