A Study of the Lexical Variants to Name the Devil in the Conversation of Inland Paraná

Abstract

This paper deals with a geo-sociolinguistic analysis of the lexical choices that the speakers of seventeen cities of inland Paraná State make to complete the sentence: God is in heaven and in hell is ...? The data that supported this research were collected and transcribed by researchers of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB), a contemporary initiative for the variationist study based on the importance of valuing regionalisms and understanding the motivations that generate them. In order to do so, the following analyses were carried out: (i) bibliography on the references to this being in some western religions; (ii) lexicographic, on the inclusion in dictionaries of the variants found; (iii) geolinguistics, on the spatial distribution of the variants in the interior of Paraná; and (iv) sociolinguistics to verify that extralinguistic factors such as location, sex, age, schooling and religion can interfere in the choice of the speaker over the use of this or that denomination. The data showed that the speakers of the sixteen localities of inland Paraná State know almost two dozen names for the devil, of which five are the most frequent: diabo, capeta, demônio, satanás and lúcifer, and most of them are included in dictionaries with this meaning in Aulete (1964) and Ferreira (2004). As for the extralinguistic variables, it was verified that the men and the informants of the age group II are responsible for the greater number of variants and also for the unique occurrences. The variables locality, sex and religion, which the informants profess, do not seem to influence the presence or frequency of the variants.

Keywords

• lexicon
• devil
• inland paraná