Language Ideologies and Dialect Shift in Helvécian Portuguese

Abstract

Abstract Speakers from the Helvécian community in Bahia, Brazil, have been accommodating their language variety towards standard Brazilian Portuguese for the past 60 years. This article demonstrates that a complex web of socioeconomic events is tied to this phenomenon. It provides an overview of the most recent socioeconomic and political changes in the community, combined with a discourse analysis of the metalinguistic commentaries identified in narratives collected during my 2019 fieldwork in the community. The research demonstrates that speakers’ metalinguistic patterns are mediated by iconization, which sees younger speakers linguistically differentiate themselves from the traditional dialect. The findings support the theory that socioeconomic events cause direct linguistic change, especially among speakers of minority languages.