Zeeuws-Flemish in Brazil: multilingualism and language decay

In this paper, we present the linguistic and cultural description of the Brazilian Zeeuws-Flemish population in Espírito Santo, which today has no more than 20 speakers. The Zeeuws-Flemish speakers, hundreds of whom left Zeeland in 1858-1862, have faced hardship and difficulty in adaptation and integration into Brazilian society ever since their arrival, with their language threatened not only by Brazilian Portuguese, but also by Brazilian Pomeranian, somewhat of a lingua franca among the Germanic Protestant community in the region. In this paper we present a sociolinguistic survey of the Braz... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Elizana Schaffel Bremenkamp
Kathy Rys
Andrew Nevins
Gertjan Postma
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
Reihe/Periodikum: Gragoatá, Vol 22, Iss 42, Pp 435-472 (2017)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Universidade Federal Fluminense
Schlagwörter: Immigration. Language practices. Language policies / Romanic languages / PC1-5498 / French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature / PQ1-3999
Sprache: Portuguese
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26699848
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n42a852

In this paper, we present the linguistic and cultural description of the Brazilian Zeeuws-Flemish population in Espírito Santo, which today has no more than 20 speakers. The Zeeuws-Flemish speakers, hundreds of whom left Zeeland in 1858-1862, have faced hardship and difficulty in adaptation and integration into Brazilian society ever since their arrival, with their language threatened not only by Brazilian Portuguese, but also by Brazilian Pomeranian, somewhat of a lingua franca among the Germanic Protestant community in the region. In this paper we present a sociolinguistic survey of the Brazilian Zeeuws-Flemish language community and an overview of its linguistic features such as intra- and interspeaker allophony, lexical borrowing and calquing, relative pronoun neutralization, do-support, topic drop, complementizer fusion, and loss of diminutives. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n42a852 --- Original in English.