Glottolog None | Linguasphere 51-AAA-am | |
Native to Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Alagoas, Sergipe, Pernambuco (except Recife metropolitan area and Zona da Mata), Ceará (South and South-Central, region also known popularly as "Cariri"), Bahia (North and North-Central, in the São Francisco River Valley), southeastern of Piauí and southwest of Maranhão Native speakers about 54 million (date missing) Language family Indo-EuropeanItalicRomanceWesternIbero-RomanceWest IberianGalician-PortuguesePortugueseVernacular BrazilianCentral northeastern Portuguese |
The central northeastern dialect of Brazilian Portuguese (Portuguese: dialeto nordestino central, [d̪iaˈlɛtu nɔɦdɛʃˈt̪ĩnu sẽˈtɾaw]) is a dialect spoken in the central part of the Northeast Region, Brazil, in all the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Alagoas and Sergipe, much of the state of Pernambuco (except for the Zona da Mata and the Recife metropolitan area), northern of Bahia, southern of Ceará, southeastern of Piauí and a few regions of Maranhão. It has roughly about 53,078,137 native speakers and varies within the region. This dialect shares similarities between north coast, Baiano and Recifense dialects.
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Main features
IPA for Central northeastern Portuguese
This key also serves, for the most part, to the north coast and recifense dialects. But the dialects cited here do not have the phoneme /d͡z/ and /t͡s/, characteristic of the central northeastern dialect. Recifense dialect usually palatalize fricatives in any syllabic consonant meeting (including the end of words) and not only before /d/ and /t/. Moreover, in certain regions of southeastern of Piauí and Maranhão west coast also a greater or lesser palatalization of fricatives may occur under the influence of Amazonian dialects (northern and Amazon Plateau), and even the absence of such palatalization. That is, in some areas the sound is pronounced exactly what is written (/s/ and /z/), and others as /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. In north coast dialect, also virtually no dental stops before /i/, /j/ or /ĩ/, and in its place they use postalveolar affricates (/d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/). In contrast, the central northeastern dialect has almost exclusive predominance of dental stops before /i/, /j/ or /ĩ/. And the postalveolar affricates are used only in the following cases: in words of foreign origin in the Portuguese language, especially English; in words denoting slang and regionalisms; and phonemes are present in the standard variety of Brazilian Portuguese, are also often in television media to replace the dental stops (though never in common parlance).