Lexical differences across dialects!

Hi, again!

This week once again we have a very nice topic, which is lexical differences across dialects, and in order to discuss it I’d like to share with you some more (cool) information about the amazing country where I come from. As you all may know, Portuguese is a romance language derived from Latin that is currently the sixth most spoken language in the world. It originally comes from Portugal, but nowadays more than 80% of all Portuguese-speakers are Brazilian, which makes the Brazilian dialect the predominant one in the language (and I was very happy to see, when I arrived here, that Stanford acknowledges it by teaching the Brazilian dialect to students who want to learn our beautiful and sweet language. By the way, Prof. Lyris Wiedemann, director of the Portuguese Language program at Stanford, told me that the majority of students who want to learn Portuguese are interested in Brazilian issues).
In terms of comparison, we can say that the difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is basically similar to the one between British and American English. It means that speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of the words (which is what characterizes a dialect, if I’m not mistaken), but they have some lexical differences. Even within the Brazilian variety of the language, though, it is possible to find different dialects.
Curitiba, the city where I was born and raised, has some very typical and unique words in its lexicon. One of them, for example, is “piá”. This word, that stands for “boy”, “guy” or something alike, is used essentially in my city. And it is used a lot. I often use it as a vocative to call my friends in Curitiba, for example. But a friend of mine from Minas Gerais (which is a Brazilian state of the Southeast region) had never heard this word before I tried to call his attention by using this word as a vocative, so he did not answer to me when I used it to call him. Later he told me that he didn’t think I was talking to him, which is interesting because I remember that it took me some time to realize that the problem was that he didn’t know the word.
Another curious feature of the Curitiba’s dialect is the common use of the word “daí” (that could be translated as “then”) in the end of the sentence, as an expletive word. I find it really interesting that we Curitibanos do have this trend in our dialect but I had never noticed it until it was pointed out through a character in a Brazilian TV show. This character is a maid called Bozena (she has Polish ancestry, just like me!) that comes from my state but works in Rio de Janeiro, in a middle-class family. As it is a humor TV show, she exaggerates the trend by saying “daí” in the end of almost every sentence she pronounces. We don’t do that, but we do use this word in the end of sentence, as a way to convey an idea of consequence. Again, when I went to Rio de Janeiro and started talking, people was impressed because in fact I do use this word (it was not just a delirium of the writers). In case you got curious and want to see this very funny character, here it is a youtube link (it’s in Portuguese, but if you don’t speak it anyway you can still try to hear this word in the end of her sentences. I guess that the IPA pronunciation for the word would be /dai/): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxIaY7Y3di0

Best,

Nikolas