O vocabulário rural de Passos/Minas Gerais: um estudo linguístico nos Sertões do Jacuhy

Abstract

The objective of this work is to study the rural vocabulary of the city of Passos, which is located in the South/Southwest mesoregion of Minas Gerais. This locality is part of an area geohistorically named as Jacuhy Backlands, an area of dispute between the governments of Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo in the past. Our purpose is to show that lexicological studies point to an intimate relationship between men, the culture and the environment in which he lives. As a theoretical and methodological reference, we adopted the Sociolinguistics (Labov and Milroy), Lexicology (Biderman), Anthropological Linguistics (Durantis and Hymes), Dialectology (Isquerdo, Ferreira, Cardoso), the concept of cultural region (Diégues Jr.). Following the labovian model, we started from the present days, collecting our data from 15 oral interviews conducted in the rural area of Passos, went back to the past, consulting dictionaries from the 18th (Bluteau) and 19th Centuries (Morais), and returned to the present in order to draw comparisons between these periods. After the analysis of the data, we found cases of retention, linguistic variation and changes through time, the existence of a regional vocabulary, and cases of influence from the vocabulary of the countryside of Sao Paulo. We also found lexias which are common in the South and North of Minas Gerais. The results obtained through our research evince the historical, social, and cultural aspects of the region, highlighting the importance of the agriculture and the activity of raising beef cattle in feedlots in Passos.