Avaliação fonológica do contato linguístico nas cantigas da nação Ketu no candomblé

Abstract

This paper proposes a phonological evaluation of language contact in the songs of the Ketu nation in Candomblé. Candomblé is a religion that grew out of the contact between various African cultures, sharing not only their practices but also their languages. Knowledge of this contact is important for understanding how these languages function on Brazilian soil. It is well known that the main ethnic groups brought over were from the Niger-Congo, Gbe and Bantu families. All of them express themselves through songs, an important genre for the development of rituals, and these songs also enable the followers of this religion to learn. The work started with a survey of 376 songs from the Ketu nation (of Yoruba tradition) in the FLEx program, resulting in glosses and the production of a mini-dictionary. Faced with this organization, some questions arise: what is the origin of the words in the songs? What phonological phenomena can be found from the contact between African languages? In view of these arguments and their relevance, this dissertation set out to achieve the following objectives: a) to carry out a study of variation at the phonetic-phonological level of songs in candomblé yards. It is subdivided into the following secondary goals: b) to describe the phonological variants and phenomena present in candomblé songs, based on the book “Cantando para os orixás”, by the author Altair B. Oliveira, published in 2009; c) to describe the phonetic phenomena present in candomblé songs, based on the book “Cantando para os orixás”, by the author Altair B. Oliveira, published in 2009. Oliveira from 2009; c) to identify the origins of the words present in the songs; d) to compare the phonological aspects of Yoruba and other African languages with the Nagô languages; and e) to assemble a database of the songs of the Ketu nation in candomblé, from the book “Cantando para os orixás” compiled by Altair Oliveira (2009). It was then observed that the words showed phenomena such as the insertion of the epenthetic vowel [ũ] in the speakers' pronunciation at the beginning of syllabic consonants ḿ and ń, which, if it were an influence on Portuguese, would be expected to be the insertion of the epenthetic vowel [i], and the deletion of the velar articulation /g/ in the labiovelar consonant /ɡ͡b/. With regard to /k͡p/, this consonant does not appear in the verified data. With this, we conclude that the songs have a Yoruba language lexicon, but some phenomena, such as the insertion of the epenthetic vowel at the beginning of syllabic consonants, point to a contact between African languages and not with Portuguese, since a study by Cantoni (2015) points out that, in Brazilian Portuguese, the inserted epenthetic vowel is [i]. We conclude that the phonological processes in the words of the songs indicate linguistic contact between African languages in the Nagô language of Brazil.