Carioca is a Brazilian noun or substantive used to refer anything
related to the city of Rio de Janeiro—capital of the homonymous
state—in Brazil. The original word, "kara'i oka", comes from the indigenous
Tupi language meaning "white man's house". It is said that the first
Portuguese dwellings in Rio de Janeiro were placed along a limpid stream, which
was soon adapted into Portuguese as Carioca.
The demonym meaning for the state of Rio de Janeiro is fluminense, taken from the
Latin word flumen, meaning "river". So, for instance, someone from Niterói is
both fluminense and niteroiense, while someone from Rio de Janeiro is
fluminense, and also carioca. While a "carioca" is someone who is from Rio de
Janeiro, a "carioca da gema" means someone who was born in the central area
of the city of Rio de Janeiro, mostly the neighbourhoods of "Zona Sul" and
"Centro". The term was originally created out of prejudice against the
"cariocas" from distant and poor neighbourhoods. On the other hand, those
same victims of prejudice adopted the term to refer to someone born in Rio de
Janeiro, but whose parents were necessarily also "carioca". In the same
way, it conveys a bias against descendants of immigrants, mostly from
the northeast of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is an ethnically diverse
city by the standards of Western global cities. The last PNAD census numbers for
Rio de Janeiro are: 8,576,000 White, 5,376,000 Pardo, 1,920,000 Black and
128,000 Asian or Indigenous. The last PNAD census for the city of Rio de
Janeiro is: 3,193,588 White, 2,244,997 Pardo, 809,463 Black and 75,887 Asian or
Indigenous. Like other Brazilians, cariocas speak
Portuguese. The carioca accent and sociolect are the most famous of Brazil,
in part because Rede Globo, the second largest television network in the world,
is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, a lot of Brazilian TV programs,
from news and documentary to entertainment, feature carioca acting
and speaking talent. Accomplishments and influence
Carioca people have invented a few sports; the most famous is footvolley
Cariocas are credited with creating the bossa nova dance.
Famous cariocas in English language film include Brazilian "bombshell" Carmen
Miranda. An eponymous song from 1933, Carioca, has become a jazz standard.
Sociolect The Portuguese spoken across the states
of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, as well neighboring towns in Minas Gerais
and in the city of Florianópolis, has similar features, little distinctive
from each other, so that cities as Paraty, Resende, Campos dos Goytacazes,
Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Vila Velha and Linhares may be said to sport the same
tone together with Rio de Janeiro, as they will hardly be perceived as strong
regional variants by people from other parts of Brazil.
The Brazilian Portuguese variant spoken in the city of Rio de Janeiro is called
carioca, and it is called sotaque locally, a word literally translated as
"accent". It can be said that Rio de Janeiro presents a sociolect inside the
major fluminense-capixaba tone, as speakers inside the city may be easily
recognizable more by their slang than the way the phonology of their speech,
closer to the standard Brazilian Portuguese present in media than other
variants. It is known for the first place of diffusion of several
distinctive traits new to either variant of the Portuguese language, most
notably: (for Brazilians) Coda and can be
pronounced as palato-alveolar [ʃ] and [ʒ], such as those of English, or
alveolo-palatal [ɕ] and [ʑ], such as those of Catalan. This trait is
inherited from European Portuguese, and carioca shares it only with
florianopolitano and some other fluminense accents. In the northern
tones of Brazilian Portuguese, not all coda and become postalveolar – rhymes
do not, for example. (for Europeans) , as well what would be
coda in European Portuguese, may be realized as various voiceless and voiced
guttural-like sounds, most often latter ones, and many or most of them can be
part of the phonetic repertory of a single speaker. Among them the velar and
uvular fricative pairs, as well both glottal transitions, the voiceless
pharyngeal fricative and the uvular trill i.e. [x], [ɣ], [χ], [ʁ], [h], [ɦ],
[ħ] and [ʀ]. This diversity of allophones of a single rhotic phoneme is
rare among not just Brazilian Portuguese, but also among major world
languages. (for both) Originally probably from Tupi
influence, through the Portuguese post-creole that appeared in
southeastern Brazil after the ban of língua geral paulista as a marker of
Jesuit activity by the Marquis of Pombal, the consonants and before or
final unstressed /ɛ ~ e/ become affricates [tʃ ~ tɕ] and [dʒ ~ dʑ],
respectively. This is now common place in Brazilian Portuguese, as it spread
with the bandeiras paulistas, expansion of mineiros to the Center-West and mass
media. It is not as universal in São Paulo, Espírito Santo and southern
Brazil, even though those were populated mostly by the original bandeirantes
because the Europeans immigrants learning Portuguese and their
descendants preferred more conservative registers of the language, perhaps as a
mark of a separate social identity. (for both) Historical [ɫ], that merged
with coda in caipira, had gone labialization to [lʷ], and then
vocalized to [u̯]; Nevertheless, with the exception of [ʊ̯] be the one used in
Southern Brazil and São Paulo instead of [u̯], both commonly transcribed as [w],
this process is now nearly ubiquitous in Brazilian Portuguese, so that only some
areas retain velarized lateral alveolar approximant or retroflex approximant as
coda . These traits, as a whole and consistent
among the vast majority of speakers, were once specifically characteristic of
Rio de Janeiro speech, and distinguished particularly from the pronunciation of
São Paulo and areas further south, which formerly had adapted none of these
characteristics at large. The chiado of the coda sibilant is thought to date
from the early 1800s occupation of the city by the Portuguese royal family.
More recently, however, all of these traits have spread throughout much of
the country due to the cultural influence of the city, that diminished
the social marker character the lack of palatalization once had. As said above,
affrication is today widespread, if not nearly omnipresent among young
Brazilians, while coda "guttural R" is also found nationwide, although to a way
lesser extent among speakers in the 5 southernmost states other than Rio de
Janeiro, while if tone is a good social indicator, about half have a tone that
consistently palatalizes coda sibilant in some instances.
Another common characteristic of carioca speech is, in a stressed final rhyme,
the addition of before coda . This change may have originated in the
Northeast, where pronunciations such as Jesus [ʒeˈzujs] have long been heard.
Also from Northeastern Brazil and Spanish immigration comes
debuccalization of coda sibilant e.g. mesmo [meɦmu]. Albeit it is assumed for
many Brazilians that this is specific to Rio, in the Northeast debuccalization
had long been a strong and advanced phonological process that may also
affect onset sibilants and , as well as other consonants, primarily [v].
There are some grammatical characteristics of this sociolect as
well, an important one is the mixing of second person pronouns você and tu, even
in the same speech. For instance, while normative Portuguese requires lhe as
oblique for você, and te as oblique for tu, in carioca slang the once formal
você is used for all cases. In informal speech, the pronoun tu is retained, but
with the verb forms belonging to the form você: Tu foi na festa?; so the
verbal forms are the same for both você and tu.
Many cariocas, as well as many paulistas, will shorten "você", using
"cê" instead: "Cê vai pra casa agora?", this practice, however, is only on the
spoken language, it is usually not written this way.
Slang words among youngsters from Rio de Janeiro include caraca! [now spread
throughout Brazil], e aê? and qualécoé?, and maneiro and sinistro. Many of these
slang words can be found in practically all of Brazil, due again to cultural
influence from the city. Much slang from Rio de Janeiro spreads across Brazil and
may be not known as originally from there, while those less culturally
accepted elsewhere are sometimes used to shun not only the speech of a certain
subculture, age group or social class, but the whole accent.
See also Caipira
Mineiro Gaucho
Carcamano References
Bibliography Bisol, Leda, "Introdução a estudos de
fonologia do português brasileiro", editora EDIPUCRS, ISBN 85-7430-529-4