THE PRODUCTION OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE MID VOWELS BY RUSSOPHONE MIGRANTS IN BRAZIL

Abstract

The history of Russophone immigration to Brazil began in the 19th century. The last wave of Russophone immigration to Brazil began after the USSR’s collapse and continues up to this day. There are few opportunities to study Portuguese in Russia, and many Russophones study Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on their own after arriving in Brazil. They learn the language in a naturalistic way and do not have any special knowledge of the BP phonetics. One important difficulty of Russophones who learn BP is to perceive and produce the contrast between open and closed mid vowels. In Portuguese, the contrasts in the pairs /ε/ — /e/ and /ɔ/ — /o/ are of fundamental importance and determine the difference in the semantic meaning of words, for example, in some homograph pairs that consist of a verb conjugated in the first-person singular of the present tense and a related noun. The aim of this work is to characterize the production of BP mid vowels by Russophone immigrants in Brazil. In this work, we analyzed the audio recordings of the words bebe [‘bεbı] ‘he drinks’, bebo [‘bebʊ] ‘I drink’, posso [‘pɔsʊ] ‘I can’ и poço [‘posɔ] ‘a well’, produced by 11 native BP speakers and 15 Russophones. For the Russophones, these was no difference between the F1 mean values of the vowels produced in the word pairs containing the two contrasting Portuguese mid vowels. The results of this study provide a base for developing strategies to improve the pronunciation of BP sounds by Russian speakers. Refs 31.