“Bunitim demais da conta”:

linguistic beliefs and attitudes about the Minas Gerais way of speaking in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte

Abstract

Understanding linguistic variation as a social practice involves understanding not only how people produce and use language in the different social practices of society, it also implies including how speakers perceive and interpret what is being said, or even how they generally assess language in use. Faced with the need to understand how Mineiro speakers from the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte evaluate the Mineiro way of speaking, in this research, an instrument of linguistic beliefs and attitudes is elaborated. With this, the objective of this study is to verify if the inquired miners tend to react positively or negatively about their way of speaking, in addition to what are the social meanings mobilized by the survey respondents to characterize their dialectal variety. Respondents exhibited social cohesion in the way they rated their own way of speaking. A sense of pride and solidarity with the group to which the speaker is present is perceptible based on the social meanings listed as characterizing the way of speaking in the region. Also noteworthy is the redefinition of the meaning of “caipira” which, potentially associated with the evaluative dimension, in this study, is a social meaning that marks the persona from Minas Gerais.