Linguistic Attitudes: A study concerning indigenous women in the Guarani village Tekoha Añetete

Abstract

This paper discusses research findings on the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of some informants from Guarani village Tekoha Añetete in Diamante d’Oeste, Paraná state. This area was chosen due to the sociolinguistic complexity highlighted by the multi-ethnic place from the tri-border area, with a significant presence of Guarani Indigenous. Six bilingual women informants were interviewed to compose the corpus of this study whose mother tongue is Guarani and their second language is Portuguese. Variables such as gender and age range were considered (from 20 to 35 years old, from 36 to 55 years old and over 55 years old). Thus, according to the theoretical-methodological principles of Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]), as well as other research works focused on linguistic beliefs and attitudes (MORENO FERNÁNDEZ, 1998; AGUILERA, 2008; CORBARI, 2013), the points of view of six informant women were analyzed regarding their responses to five questions from the semi-structured survey, which aimed at reflecting on the manifestations of cognitive, affective and conative components, indicators of linguistic attitudes trend. It was observed that the language, inside and outside the village, suggests that both Guarani culture and language are more prestigious than the others studied here.

Keywords

• language attitudes
• guarani
• brazilian portuguese