"Caipira" Dialect's Current Oral Lexicon Related to Religion and Beliefs in Itu, a City Intending to Become a World Heritage
Abstract
This study deals with the current spoken lexicon of Itu, one of the most historically important Brazilian cities within Medio Tiete, a region that belongs to Sao Paulo State and is the cradle of "Caipira" dialect in the mentioned State. The semantic area concerned is related to religion and beliefs, and the specific forms are: capeta diabo demonio lucifer (as)sombracao espirito fantasma alma encosto macumba feitico amuleto (da sorte) medalha/medalhinha escapulario.
Romero (2007) and Figueiredo Jr. (2019) directly collected these data from 24 informants in the form of an interview based on two versions of a questionnaire by the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil ("ALiB") Project. As an original aim of this paper, the afore-mentioned denoting items are dialectologically analyzed, and their current status is identified in correlation with extralinguistic variables (diagender-specific, diagenerational, diastratic, and diarreligious).
Further, etymological information is also provided.