Sociolinguistic evaluations of maranhenses university students about second person singular personal pronouns

Abstract

To contribute to the description of maranhense portuguese, based on the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics, this study proposes to investigate sociolinguistic evaluations of university students from Maranhão on second-person singular personal pronouns: “tu” without verbal agreement (tu quer), “tu” with verbal agreement (tu queres) and “você” (você quer). To this end, a questionnaire was created that made it possible to raise meta-comments on Maranhão speaking and some specific linguistic variants such as personal pronouns tu without agreement with the verb, with agreement and the pronoun you. Then, a qualitative and quantitative analysis was carried out. The meta-comments were organized in an Excel spreadsheet and condensed into word clouds with the help of the Word Art website. The results of the analyzes showed that the majority of university students agree with the discourse about the overvaluation of maranhense portuguese. Furthermore, it was possible to observe a preference for using the pronoun “tu” without verbal agreement, to the detriment of the pronoun “tu” with verbal agreement and the pronoun “you”, even though many students made positive metacomments for the latter.