Estudo sócio-onomástico de nomes de urna no português brasileiro

Abstract

This research examines the practice of naming people involved in Brazilian political elections. In this context, candidates must choose a name to display on the electronic ballot box. This name, used throughout the electoral campaign, must adhere to the linguistic norms established by Law n.º 9.504 /1997 (Elections Law) and by the resolutions of the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court. Based on a study with this category of anthroponyms and the contributions of some works already developed (Amaral; Machado, 2015; Amaral; Coutinho, 2021; Boas, 2014; Soares, 2017; Santos; Rocha, 2019), we analyzed a set of 5,403 ballot box names of state and district deputies elected between 2002 and 2022, covering all units of the federation, names that was sourced from the Open Data Portal of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). In analyzing these data, we utilized the theoretical and methodological contributions of Labovian Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008 [1972]; Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 2006 [1968]) and Socio-Onomastics (Ainiala, 2016; Ainiala & Östman, 2017). Our discussions also considered the links between language, society, and power relations, particularly in the political sphere where ballot box names emerge. Using the GoldVarb X application, we analyzed the 5,403 names and found that 1.369 (25,3%) there are differences regarding the civil name. These changes included morphological alterations, insertions of qualifiers and other elements, and total or partial substitutions of the legal name. In the analysis of social factors, geographical origin, the year of the election and the candidate's level of education are the variables that the program selected, in this order of statistical relevance, indicating that these factors influence, to some extent, the variation in the ballot names we analyzed. What we can conclude from our reflections on the corpus is that the candidates mobilize different linguistic resources, whether or not they consider their civil names, to structure their ballot box names, so that the use of this anthroponym can function as an important electoral marketing strategy. Finally, through our results and discussions about ballot box names, we aim to contribute to the description of Brazilian anthroponymy, within the scope of Socio-Onomastics, especially considering recent studies that have adopted new categories of anthroponyms in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as their object of study.