Azorean Portuguese and what makes it Awesome
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- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- Today we talk about Azorean Portuguese and what makes it unique (and really beautiful in my opinion). As I said in the video, I just started college so life has been a bit busy which is why this upload was so late, but I hope to change that with some more language and music content coming soon :) Again, I'm also considering streaming (and will make a community post about it), so let me know what you guys might wanna see in one of my streams. Enjoy!
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RESOURCES & REFERENCES
• [Açoriano Legendado] - • Açoriano legendado
• [Another Speech Sample] - • Jovens apaham Tubarão ...
• [Another Speech Sample] - • Pescador de Rabo de Pe...
• [Paper on Front Vowels] - www.researchga...
• [ALEAç] - www.culturacore...
• [Azorean Expressions] - • Sotaque e expressões d...
I come from a city in Southern Brazil called Itajaí and everyone here is proud of their azorian heritage. We have a distinct accent here (I'd say the entire northern coast of the state of Santa Catarina) that sounds a lot like 19th century açoriano, and these videos go viral here from time to time because literally no one understands them. I think the reason why I have an easier time understanding açorianos speaking is because I speak French and to me they really sound like a French person trying to speak Portuguese.
AHAH that's awesome dude and i'd love to check that out, lmk if you have any links to those vids ur talking about
600 years of isolation is a long time, and given how much both Faroese and Icelandic diverged from Old Norse within 900 years, I'm surprised that Azorean Portuguese didn't fully separate into its own separate language.
1 month of agony without any uploads
EHEHHE
@@mamayut5085 he really sunned our dro
The man the myth the legend has uploaded
Me watching the vid knowing jack shit about romance languages :
U DONT NEED TO but i highly recommend watching smt like easyportuguese and listening to brazilians, then comparing it to the azorean varieties so u can see the difference in cadence cuz it's awesome
@@Sundrobrocc will check them out, probably more productivr than whatever
/ow/ being fronted is actually quite common when Russian speakers try to exaggeratedly pronounce the English vowel (especially in rap). I guess it reflects English already fronting it to /əw/ and the closest Russian sound to that /ə/ is even more fro red than that
Oh wow I didn't know that; do you have an example I could listen to?
@@Sundrobrocc I can't remember a rap example, but the "очень очень affordable" meme video has a bit of that fronting
For someone that's learning Portuguese and is a linguist enthusiast I really recommend you to check out Capeverdian creole, its a very underated language, but for someone that speaks Portuguese (I'm Brazilian) it's very interesting. Capeverdian creole its the oldest creole language, was based on the Portuguese of the 1400's, you can clearly see some features that reminds Brazilian Portuguese, some others that reminds European Portuguese, but with its unic features (more than 600 years of evolution) that makes that language so good to hear. Actually there's it's own "language family", it blow's my mind that a creole language as old as the beginning of the European exploration, would developed a "language family", for example, Papiamento cames from the Capeverdian creole! Nice video btw.
YEAHH!! I've known Papiamento for a little while now and it's always fascinated me
Awesome vid! Big respect to everyone whose been able to document all those distinct accent features
From where I'm from in Brazil we also tend to ignore the 's' in mesmo, saying something like 'mêmu' (also happens to the final s in conjugations and plurals but that's another thing). Btw really cool how the Azores has so many different ways of saying the same word even though it's a small archipelago.
E boa sorte aprendendo português! Sua pronúncia é muito boa, achei até que fosse falante nativo
oh that's sooo coolll e muito obrigado :)
Cool overview! Glad to get an insight into another unique variety of a fairly common language. The comment calling it the "Scottish of Portuguese" was not lost on me lol.
yessss unique varieties of common(ish) langs are my favorite thing ever it's so great
i dont speak portuguese yet but as a spanish speaker it always makes my brain feel
confused to hear portuguese because its like i SHOULD be able to understand it but i just barely dont. especially because i can read it fairly well
as for streams, i would A) definitely be interested in that! and B) would love to see you conlang (if you do that) or a QnA or a like a "study a language for an hour" type thing where you find and read from a grammar and talk about it with the viewers
or a stream where you make music, since you also like that
YEAH! Though from my experience, after just 2 weeks of consistently watching videos and news with captions on in Portuguese, you learn to associate what you read to what you hear which bridges that intelligibility pretty significantly. You should try it out, it's really cool.
As for the stream ideas, those are all amazing! If I end up doing one of those I'll make sure to mention your name at some point :)
Im not really even a linguistics person (well, a little bit! but i dont know much about it) but I am actually really interested in the Azores so its very cool that UA-cam recommended me this video despite its low viewcount! Absolutely amazing work, the video was fun, fast-paced and these accents are wild!
OH hang on im an idiot haha I didnt realise who you were!! i have in fact watched and enjoyed your two previous videos as well!
AW glad you enjoyed it :)
wow, thanks for this video. I've picked up bits of portuguese especially from media, but while visiting my American grandmother who migrated to São Miguel before 2000 it was very confusing to hear anyone speak and i cant make ANY sense of it lol. I don't know enough portuguese to make this research feasible for me, so this is an awesome introduction and i appreciate it being brief yet thorough!
That's awesome!! i'm sure one day you'll be able to understand it better lol, the same happened to me after watching a bunch of azorean content :)
They are really recreating french there x)
Now that I'm rewatching the video of the açoriano fisher, I notice there's also a tendency to emphasize more the last stressed syllable of the utterance, a feature which again reminds me of french!
YEAH
i've noticed this too!!!!!!! seems like a sociocultural thing tho cuz it doesn't happen in all cases but it for sure is a thing. really cool stuff
OMG MY FAVORITE UA-camR JUST UPLOADED🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤
BRO MIGHT BE BRO 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🦶🦶🦶🦶
Nice video! Nevertheless, I would like to contribute with some few things:
1 - I am not sure that what happens is general vowel fronting. What happens is rather what linguists call “vowel rotation”, i.e., vowels shifting one after the other. The first step is (we are talking about stressed vowels, here) the vowel [u] is indeed fronted to [y]; then, the vowel [o] takes the place of [u]; the vowel [ɔ] takes the place of [o]; the vowel [a] shifts to [ɑ]; the vowel [ɛ] shifts to [æ]. This penomenon is not unique to Azorian Portuguese. It happened with French, with Swedish and with Classical Greek. It also ocurrs in continental Portugal in some linguistic pockets like the Barlavento Algarvio and near Castelo Branco. Check Cunha & Cintra, among others, for sources.
2 - The diphthong [ow] is perhaps not “fronted” but rather “monothonged” to [ø] due to the influence of [w] (perhaps through [ɥ]: [ow] >> *[oɥ] >> [ø]). In the case of “coisa” >> ['køzɐ], it reflects the older Portuguese word “cousa”. Words like “foi” are not pronounced *[fø], but rather [fuj] (which is not mistaken with “fui” which is pronounced [fyj]).
3 - The final unstressed vowels written and were never pronounced [e] and [o] in Portuguese, at least after the separation of Galician and Portuguese. They were always pronounced and . In European Portuguese (and, after that, in the Portuguese varieties spoken in Africa), has shifted to .
4 - In (very) informal and careless speech, “mesmo” is commonly pronounced ['memu] elsewhere.
thats honestly really interesting and i hadn't considered that possibility of vowel rotation, but now that you mention it it sticks out like a sore thumb
super super awesome insights dude tysm for the comment :)
As for the ou/oi/ø situation, in European Portuguese in general it's not uncommon for words to alternate between "ou" and "oi", with some words having essentially two forms like "louro/loiro" (blonde) and "louça/loiça" (dishes).
It's not too big a stretch to imagine this developing into a merger in Azorean, especially with "u" being fronted to "y" (which is what triggered the similar process in Icelandic).
Portuguese language teacher here: the case of "mesmo" is a particular one. In very informal European Portuguese, the 's' is dropped in that word, especially in Greater Lisbon area. I don't know whether that was due to influence of Brazilian speakers from regions where that -s- is pronounced quite low in the throat.
very interesting, what do you mean by regions where /s/ is pronounced "quite low in the throat"? can you compare it to other sounds?
@@Sundrobrocc I think he's referring to the Brazilian, more specifically, the Rio de Janeiro pronunciation of mesmo, where the word sounds more like "mehmo", that is, the s becomes aspirated.
Even if not nearly as common as in Spanish, /s/ aspiration is found in Portuguese too. Por exemple, in some speakers of the Alentejo, the final /s/ of some words becones slightly aspirated, but not like a complete /h/ sound, specially when emphasizing a word9. This is a very obscure feature of alentejano portuguese; I've never seen any article or paper referencing this feature, and I would never know about it if I weren't from the Alentejo and spoke like this xD
@@Sundrobrocc closer to the [x] or [χ] sound.
@@gusinfante [x] is possible but no one says mesmo with a uvular sound even in Rio. That's an exaggeration from people whose accent lacks uvulars and they don't understand where we'd put it (mostly around ô, ó, a, â and nasal vowels, particularly before voiceless consonants-except for the t in /ti/ which fronts it to [x]).
Aside from [ˈmeʑmʊ], [ˈmeɪ̯ʑmʊ] and [ˈmeɘ̯ʑmʊ] we pronounce it [ˈmeɦmʊ], [ˈmexm̥ʊ], [ˈmehm̥ʊ̥], [ˈmeɦmˠ], [ˈmexm̥ˠ], [ˈmem̤ʊ], [mem̤ˠ], [ˈmehm̥ˠ], [ˈme.hm̩], [ˈme.hm̩ˠ]. Generally not very throaty.
Terrific video but a few nitpicks
1. Almost every Portuguese dialect has the simplification of /ou/ to [o] [oː]. Only in northern Portugal this is unusual. Meanwhile, southern Portugal is unique for fronting /ei/ to [e] [eː] before consonants other than [ɾ] (where [eː] [eɘ̯] [eə̯] is even expected in Brazil).
We have also had a fronting of /ou/ to /oi/ ever since the Middle Ages, that's how cousa became coisa, doudo (Dodo bird, pássaro doudo... today it wouldn't be a pássaro because a pássaro is supposed to either fly without being scary like an eagle, whimsical like an owl or a flamingo or awkwardly edible-looking like a duck; if not those, it needs to be small, light and uh cute like a kākāpo or a kiwibird) became doido, mouta became moita, and in Portugal specifically they often say loiça for louça, and some people even toiro for touro and oiro for ouro. Louro and loiro compete for the hair color in both countries whereas laurel/bay leaf is always louro (at least in Brazil). In Brazil, toicinho can be heard for toucinho. Frouxo has an older alternative form froixo. This made me think of how in Mirandese the euro is also called ouro, if you want to see crazy unexpected diphthongs (when compared to Spanish and Portuguese) the Astur-Leonese languages definitely rock too.
Personally I think it'd be cute as hell if we merged all of those ancient /ou/ turned /oi/ back to the original one and pronounced /ou/ as [oʉ̯] by default, sounding kinda like Australians, but I am a 29-year-old man, so I cannot initiate linguistic innovation 😢 and I have an impression most Brazilians would think this sounds smug because [y] is associated with French (though we do have [ʏ] at vários and [ɪ̃ɥ̃] at -inho in careless speech). Could work in Portugal.
2. The final 'e' and 'o' in Galician-Portuguese are never supposed to be [e] and [o], with few exceptions like Portuguese people saying euro as [ˈ(j)eʊ̯ɾɔ] or the extremely innovative amigue which I pronounce [ɜˈmʲiɣe] (yes I am carioca, yes I have [bβ ~ β] [d̪ð ~ ð] [ɡɣ ~ ɣ], we exist and dare I say are the majority) because I consider [ɐˈmʲiɡʲɪ] so condescendingly childish-sounding to the point of grossness... the way linguagem neutra sounds like tatebitate with the Brazilian /i/ feels in itself like an anti-nonbinary slur.
Dialects not doing the vowel reduction for normal words OTOH are suffering from language loss due to Spanish influence (Galicia) or were originally settled by a group with strong Spanish-speaking, Italian peninsula or Slavic participation (southern Brazil). It is alien to Portuguese and I want to give a cascudo to every Brazilian who does not know to explain this correctly to gringos, even saying that "we pronounce them wrong" (even worse when a southern Brazilian hails their accent as better... *Portuguese is not Spanish*, not our fault Getúlio wasn't tough enou-ok I don't really mean that but this is how pissed off those people make me).
Something no one teaches people about Brazilian Portuguese is that we devoice and delete vowels too, word-final /i/ can be [i] in very few dialects (chiefly Recife) but it's generally [ɪ], [ɪ̥], [ʲɪ], [ʲɪ̥] or [ʲ] whereas /u/ can be [u] but that sounds extremely Angolan to me, the real production is extremely varied as [ʊ], [ʊ̥], [ˠʷʊ], [ˠʊ], [ˠʷʊ̥], [ˠʊ̥], [ˠʷɪ̈], [ˠᵝɪ̈], [ˠɪ̈], [ʷɪ̈], [ᵝɪ̈], [ˠʷɪ̥̈], [ˠᵝɪ̥̈], [ˠɪ̥̈], [ʷɪ̥̈], [ᵝɪ̥̈], [ˠʷ], [ˠᵝ], [ˠ], [ʷ], [ᵝ] or straight up [∅] (as in deletion).
3. As mentioned by others, almost every Brazilian dialect now has people backing /s/ to [x] or much more common debuccalizing it to [h ɦ] in mesmo, with other possibilities like a long vowel plus deletion or a breathy-voiced [m̤]. Debuccalization of /s/ in itself is pretty typical of Tupi and Macro-Jê languages and is also present in Pirahã; it was spread from Northeast and Northern Brazil to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasília in the 20th century, but it was already present in the Pampa gaúcho possibly due to Spanish influence. And we apparently spread it to Lisbon according to a comment here.
4. Brazilians often mix up the conjugations for nós and a gente, although this is deemed infinitely less acceptable than using third person for tu, or using teu/tua/ti/contigo and você together (nobody uses para si or consigo for você, ele or ela in Brazilian Portuguese). With that said, it's still extremely prevalent-hence "é nóis na fita". In general it's just more efficient to combine nós+third person singular, so that's why you have never heard an a gente somos, but it still definitely exists irl, generally from people of incomplete primary school education. People from Portuguese-speaking African countries often laugh at us for having "extremely poor grammar".
5. We have more and more [ɑ] in Brazil these days but it's a slightly more centralized and either truly rounded or sulcalized allophone of... /ɔ/. You read that right, many, many Brazilians chiefly from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and southern Brazil, with a slant towards women and middle and upper classes, have a relatively unrounded and lowered /ɔ/. Myself included. It's not from being bilingual in English, first because only 0.2% of Brazilians are truly fluent and second because I have always pronounced and heard vó that way. A cardinal [ˈvɔ] pronunciation sounds extremely mineiro, caipira, nordestino, nortista or sertanejo. Other words with [ɑ] are tóxico, lógico, joia, [ˈfɑ(d)ʑ(ɪ)]*, [ˈdɾɑɡ͡ɣə], sorte, cólica and torta, but tóxico pronounced tóchico as a joke, forte, pródigo, bote, só getting a [ɔ] while pode, [ˈfɑd̪͡ðə] and córrego are variable. Nota is usually [ɑ] but nota-se is variable. The sound is in-between the American true [ɑ], the British [ɒ] (actually sulcalized) and the Korean [ʌ].
* Speaking of sulcalization, I have an almost minimal pair of ponte [ˈpʰɔ̝̃.ɕ̩], ponche [ˈpõ.ʃ̩] and pões [ˈpʰõ̞ɪ̯̃ɕ]. The difference is that the first sibilant is very sulcalized and produced with a concave blade of the tongue (idk if it's preceded by [t̚]?), the second has a very flat tongue overall (I could have a bunched alveolo-palatal there too though) and the last has a bunched tongue that just forms a gentle hill closer to the shape of a semi-circle (the sibilant in ponte has a tighter constriction against the hard palate and almost sounds like a [ç]). People started talking about this deletion of the stop element of the Brazilian affricate in the Watch Your Language video about future linguistic forms of languages other than English. (For people from the future, I am saying this in September 2024.) I denied it because I am pretty sure the stop element is still there, it's just unreleased, but... Can we not release only the first part of an affricate?!
Wow, what an informative comment. This is why i love the comments section-i always say this but you seriously learn more every time and its great
Bruh this comment makes me not want to learn Portuguese. Seems so chaotic
@@DY142 you can basically ignore everything they said if you're only there to learn the spoken language. it's definitely useful to know stuff like that, but it's not at all necessary to get that technical about portuguese linguistics if you're just trying to learn the language so dw :)
@@DY142 Our grammar has like 10% of the crazy exceptions of English (it's basically Spanish but with an extra tense that you can completely ignore as you long story short only need it in order to describe future hypotheticals, no one will judge you if you just use the easier tense, as again most Brazilians don't get pronouns and basic conjugations right a tenth of the time) and our pronunciation matches the orthography 75% of the time, 97% consistent if you know about those rules like e being /i/ and o being /u/ at the end of words. You'll do fine.
I don't get why the comments of those videos say they can't understand it since I don't find it that hard and i'm not even used to hearing the Portuguese Accents 😭, but Azorean sounds really cool and very on the back of the mouth.
Also about "mesmo" being /məm/, althought it's still marginal some people pronounce it the same way here in Brazil too.
The "S" in the middle of a word /end of syllables is gradually being ellided or turning into a short I. In my dialect in particular we pronounce it /h/ like Puerto Rican Spanish.
As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker who can understand the Portuguese accent pretty well... usually... (my great grandfather was Portuguese and even my grandfather had an accent)... what the hell is going on 😂
fronted "u" {[u] -> [y]} seems to happen frequently. i know norwegians do it. and lots of Brits and Irish do it too.
very true of the brits
Hey while this is a great linguistic video, the way you use Brazilian Portuguese to compare it to the Azorean variant kind of makes this irrelevant because most words used are very similar in Continental Portuguese and Azorean Portuguese. Couve and Unha to name a few examples used
I know the words used (lexical variation) are very similar-this video was mostly about pronunciation (phonology); did I maybe misunderstand your comment?
hmm, about cabeças, to my ears it sounded something like [kɐ'bɤsɐʃ] or similar, which suggests stressed backing of [e]? maybe to do with the presence of /a/? maybe just because? either way it seems similar to the stressed schwa shenanigans you get in romanian, where historical /ə/ ends up as /ɨ/, which gives it its unique not quite romance sound. as for central and unrounded back vowels, they do also appear in european portuguese, but exactly where i don't know
the thing is that i hear something like [kɐˈvɤu̯sɐʃ] with that [ɤu̯] diphthong. stressed /e/ could indeed be something to look into but it doesn't happen with words like "até" to my knowledge, so we'll see
Are you by any chance from Rio originaly ?
nope why?
@@Sundrobrocc Your pronounciation of portuguese words sound very carioca to my paulistano ears
you should look into barlavento algarvio and castelo branco dialects to know more about the main culprits of S.Miguel Portuguese uniqueness
OOO do u have any specific videos you want me to look at? that sounds super exciting
@@Sundrobrocc don't have anything other than the Portuguese UA-camr Dário Guerreiro, he's from Portimão and speaks the local dialect. Don't have anything from Castelo Branco, sorry, only some info from linguistic classes and the Portuguese language atlas by Lindley Cintra, though it's pretty old by now.