O português dos jovens da aldeia Afukuri: notas sobre o contato linguístico no Alto Xingu

In this article we present a preliminary description of some phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of the Portuguese spoken by young adults in the community of Afukuri, on the basis of a small corpus collected and analysed by adult high school students of the Kuikuro ethnic group in the community of Afukuri in the Upper Xingu. Although Standard Portuguese is progressively penetrating the linguistic repertories of these young adults due to contemporary almost omnipresent schooling, the characteristics of Xinguan Portuguese described in Emmerich (q.v. Emmerich 1984; Emmerich and Paiva 2009) are maintained and display both an apparent homogenisation, in spite of the existing multilingualism in the region, and elements of the typical linguistic repertoire of Kuikuro speech. We suggest that the existence of Kuikuro native elements through code-mixing can be considered a pragmatic phenomenon (Gumperz 1982, 84), as well as as a second-order index (Silverstein 2003), as a means of reinforcing the speakers’ particular ethnic identities in interaction within the Upper Xingu regional system.