Carioca

For other uses, seeCarioca (disambiguation).

Not to be confused withKaraoke.

Carioca(Portuguese pronunciation:[kaɾiˈɔkɐ]or[kɐɾiˈɔkɐ]) is ademonymused to refer to anything related to theCity of Rio de Janeiro,inBrazil.The original meaning of the term is controversial, maybe fromTupi language"kari' oka",meaning" white house "as the whitewashed stone houses of European settlers or even the colonists themselves, by merging"kara'iwa"(white man) and"oka"(house). Currently, the more accepted origin in academia is the meaning derived from"kariîó oka",which comes from the indigenous tupi" house ofcarijó",which wasGuaraní,a nativetribeof Rio de Janeiro who lived in the vicinity of theCarioca River,between the neighborhoods ofGlóriaandFlamengo.

Like other Brazilians,Cariocasspeak Portuguese. Thecariocaaccent andsociolect(also simply called "carioca",see below) are one of the most widely recognized in Brazil, in part becauseTV Globo,the second-largest television network in the world, is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, many Brazilian TV programs, from news and documentary to entertainment (such as thetelenovelas), featurecarioca-acting and -speaking talent.

History

Cariocas

The archaic demonym for the Rio de Janeiro State isFluminense,taken from the Latin wordflūmen,meaning "river". Despite the fact thatCariocais a more ancient demonym of Rio de Janeiro's inhabitants (known since 1502), it was replaced byfluminensein 1783, when the latter was sanctioned as the official demonym of the Royal Captainship of Rio de Janeiro (later the Province of Rio de Janeiro). A few years after the City of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro had become the capital city of the Brazilian colonies. From 1783 and during all the Imperial Regime,Cariocaremained only as a nickname by which other Brazilians called the inhabitants of Rio (city and province). During the first years of the Brazilian Republic,Cariocawas the name given to those who lived in the slums or a pejorative way to refer to the bureaucratic elite of the Federal District. Only when the City of Rio lost its status as Federal District and became a Brazilian State (Guanabara State), when the capital city was moved to Brasilia, wasCariocamade a co-official demonym withGuanabarino.In 1975, the Guanabara State was eliminated by PresidentErnesto Geisel(under the military dictatorship), becoming the present-day City of Rio de Janeiro, andCariocawas made the demonym of its municipality. Nowadays, Carioca is used to exclusively refer to those born in the city of Rio de Janeiro, while everyone born in the state of Rio de Janeiro is referred to as a Fluminense.

Accomplishments and influence

See also:List of people from Rio de Janeiro

Cariocapeople have invented a few sports; the most famous isfootvolley.

Cariocasare credited with creating thebossa novastyle of music.

FamousCariocasin film include "Brazilian bombshell"Carmen Miranda,a Portuguese-born Brazilian woman who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. The eponymous song "Carioca",from the 1933 filmFlying Down to Rio,has become ajazz standard.

Carnaval Cariocais the Portuguese name for the largestBrazilian Carnival,theRio Carnival.

Samba Cariocais a localized style ofBrazilian Samba.

There is an exercise drill used for dynamic stretching calledCarioca.It consists of a repeating Samba dance step.

Sociolect

Carioca
Carioca,sotaque
Pronunciation	Portuguese pronunciation:[kaɾiˈɔkɐ]or[kɐɾiˈɔkɐ]
Region	Rio de Janeiro
Language family	Indo-European Italic Romance Western Romance Ibero-Romance West-Iberian Galician-Portuguese Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Fluminense-Capixaba dialect Carioca
Writing system	Portuguese alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	pt-u-sd-brrj

The Portuguese spoken across the states of Rio de Janeiro andEspírito Santoand neighboring towns inMinas Gerais(and to a certain extent the city ofFlorianópolis), has similar features, hardly different from one another so cities such asParaty,Resende,Campos dos Goytacazes,Cachoeiro de Itapemirim,Vila VelhaandLinharesmay be said to have the same dialect as Rio de Janeiro, as they are hardly perceived as strong regional variants by people from other parts of Brazil.

TheBrazilian Portuguesevariant spoken in the city of Rio de Janeiro (and metropolitan area) is calledCarioca,and it is calledSotaquelocally, literally translated as "accent". It can be said that Rio de Janeiro presents asociolectinside the majorFluminense-Capixabadialect, as speakers inside the city may be easily recognizable more by their slang than the way the phonology of their speech, which is closer to the standard Brazilian Portuguese in the media than other variants. It is known especially for several distinctive traits new to either variant (European or Brazilian) of thePortuguese language:

1. (for Brazilians)Coda/s/and/z/can be pronounced aspalato-alveolar[ʃ]and[ʒ]ofEnglishor thealveolo-palatal[ɕ]and[ʑ]ofCatalan.That is inherited from European Portuguese, andCariocashares it only withFlorianopolitanoand some otherFluminenseaccents. In the northern tones of Brazilian Portuguese, not all coda/s/and/z/become postalveolar.
2. (for Europeans)/ʁ/,as well what would be coda/ɾ/(when it is not pre-vocalic) in European Portuguese, may be realized as various voiceless and voicedguttural-like sounds,most often the latter (unlike in other parts of Brazil), and many or most of them can be part of the phonetic repertory of a single speaker. Among them the velar and uvular fricative pairs, as well both glottal transitions (voiced&unvoiced), thevoiceless pharyngeal fricativeand theuvular trill:[x],[ɣ](between vowels),[χ],[ʁ],[h],[ɦ],[ħ]and[ʀ].That diversity ofallophonesof a singlerhoticphoneme is rare not just in Brazilian Portuguese but among world languages.
3. (for both) The consonants/t/and/d/before/i/or final unstressed/ɛ~e/([e̞],that in this position may be raised to[i]or deleted) become affricates [tʃ~tɕ] and [dʒ~dʑ] (again, as those of English or Catalan, depending on the speaker), respectively. Originally probably from Tupi influence,through the Portuguese post-creole that appeared in southeastern Brazil after the ban ofLíngua Geral Paulistaas a marker of Jesuit activity by the Marquis of Pombal, this is now common place in Brazilian Portuguese, as it spread with theBandeiras Paulistas,expansion ofMineirosto the Center-West and mass media. It is not as universal in São Paulo, Espírito Santo and southern Brazil even though they were populated mostly by the originalbandeirantes(caboclos,formerlyLíngua Geralspeakers) because the European immigrants learning Portuguese and their descendants preferred more conservative registers of the language, perhaps as a mark of a separate social identity. The Northeast had Nheengatu, another Língua Geral, too, but it had a greater native Portuguese-speaker presence, had a greater contact with the colonial metropolis and was more densely populated.
4. (for both) Historical[ɫ](/l/in syllable coda), which merged with coda/ɾ/([ɻ]) inCaipira,has undergone labialization to[lʷ],and thenvocalizedto [u̯];Nevertheless, with the exception of [ʊ̯] being used inSouthern BrazilandSão Pauloinstead of[u̯],both commonly transcribed as[w],the process is now nearly ubiquitous in Brazilian Portuguese so only some areas retain velarized lateral alveolar approximant (rural areas close to the frontier with Uruguay) or theretroflex approximant(a very fewcaipiraareas) as coda/l/.

The traits (particularly thechiado,apalatalizationprocess that creates a postalveolar pronunciation of codasandzand affricate pronunciation of[ti]and[di]andteandderhymes), as a whole and consistent among the vast majority of speakers, were once specifically characteristic of Rio de Janeiro speech and distinguished particularly from the pronunciation of São Paulo and areas further south, which formerly had adapted none of the characteristics. Thechiadoof the coda sibilant is thought to date from the early 1800s occupation of the city by the Portuguese royal family, as European Portuguese had a similar characteristic for the postalveolar codas.

More recently, however, all of the traits have spread throughout much of the country by the cultural influence of the city that diminished the social marker character the lack of palatalization once had (a part of assimilation of the caboclo minorities in most of South and Southeast Brazil). Affrication is today widespread, if not nearly omnipresent among young Brazilians, and coda guttural r is also found nationwide (their presence in Brazil is a general heritage of Tupi speech too) but less among speakers in the 5 southernmost states other than Rio de Janeiro, and if accent is a good social indicator, 95-105 million Brazilians consistently palatalize coda sibilant in some instances (but as in Rio de Janeiro, it is only a marker of adoption of foreign phonology at large in Florianópolis and Belém: palatalization, as in any other Romance language, is a very old process in Portuguese and its lacking in some dialect rather than reflecting a specific set of Galician, Spanish and indigenous influences on their formation).

Another common characteristic ofCariocaspeech is, in a stressed final syllable, the addition of /j/ before coda /s/ (mas,dezmay become[majʃ],[dɛjʃ],which can also be noted ambiguously as[mɐ̞ⁱʃ],[dɛⁱʃ]). The change may have originated in the Northeast, where pronunciations such asJesus[ʒeˈzujs]have long been heard. Also immigration from Northeastern Brazil and Spanish immigration causes debuccalization of the coda sibilant:mesmo[meɦmu].Many Brazilians assume that is specific to Rio, but in the Northeast, debuccalization has long been a strong and advanced phonological process that may also affect onset sibilants/s/and/z/as well as other consonants, primarily[v].

There are some grammatical characteristics of this sociolect as well, an important one is the mixing of second person pronounsvocêandtu,even in the same speech. For instance, whilenormativePortuguese requireslheas the oblique forvocêandteas oblique fortu,inCariocaslang, the once formalvocê(now widespread as an informal pronoun in many Brazilian Portuguese varieties) is used for all cases. In informal speech, the pronountuis retained, but with the verb forms belonging to the form você:Tu foi na festa?( "Did you go to the party?" ). So the verbal forms are the same for bothvocêandtu.

ManyCariocasand manyPaulistas(from the coast, capital city or hinterland) shortenvocêand usecêinstead:Cê vai pra casa agora?( "Are you going home now?" ). That, however, is common only on the spoken language and is rarely written.

Slang words among youngsters from Rio de Janeiro includecaraca!(gosh!) [now spread throughout Brazil],e aê?andqualé/quaé/coé?(literally "which is [it]", carrying a meaning similar to "What's up?" ),maneiro( "cool", "fine", "interesting", "amusing" ),mermão( "bro", contraction ofmeu irmão),caô(a lie), andsinistro(in standard Portuguese, "sinister"; in slang, "awesome," "terrific," but also "terrible," "troublesome," "frightening," "weird" ). Many of these slang words can be found in practically all of Brazil by to cultural influence from the city. Much slang from Rio de Janeiro spreads across Brazil and may be not known as originally from there, and those less culturally accepted elsewhere are sometimes used to shun not only the speech of a certain subculture, age group or social class but also the whole accent.

Bibliography

• Bisol, Leda (2005),"Introdução a estudos de fonologia do português brasileiro",Editora EDIPUCRS(4th ed.), Porto Alegre - Rio Grande do Sul,ISBN978-85-7430-529-5