This case study of Portuguese as spoken in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, describes the intonation of neutral declarative SVO sentences and neutral yes-no questions using the theory and methodological tools of Prosodic Phonology and Autosegmental-Metrical Intonational Phonology. High tonal density was also found, with pitch accents associated with stressed syllables of all PWs in both declaratives and yes-no questions.
Keywords: intonation; prosodic phrasing; neutral declaratives and yes-no questions; Portuguese spoken in Maputo. The colonial system imposed in Africa produced the progressive suppression of local languages, as a result of which some are nearing extinction today. Meanwhile, the nativisation of European languages underwent - and still undergoes - the inevitable impact of the complex sociolinguistic situation in the widest variety of African territories. Multilingualism is most commonly the rule in these places, where African, Asian and European languages coexist.
Regarding specifically Mozambique, multilingualism is highly latent, because a very recent language policy project has spread Portuguese countrywide. As a result, although Portuguese is the only official language, it is not the most spoken in Mozambique. On the assumption that 1 the prestige variety for Mozambicans is European Portuguese EP and 2 Portuguese coexists with a collection of local Bantu languages, which are tonal languages, this study examined the Portuguese spoken in Maputo MP , the capital of Mozambique, and compared it with other African varieties of Portuguese and with EP 1.
The focus of inquiry was the intonation displayed in neutral declaratives and neutral yes-no questions in a data set of recorded controlled speech reading task by a young female speaker case study , who was born in Maputo and is an L1 speaker of Portuguese. This paper has limitations in that it reports a case study, but its preliminary findings contribute to understanding intonation in varieties of Portuguese and to discussions of variation and change and contact linguistics.
Mozambique lies on the southeast coast of the African continent. Not until 25, June did it free itself from Portuguese domination and attain independence. As a consequence of colonisation, it inherited a European language and culture policy, while local languages and cultures were marginalised. The World population prospects: The revision, key findings and advance tables United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, estimated the population of Mozambique at million in Portuguese is still a bicentric language, given the linguistic primacy of Portugal and Brazil, which are still the two major production centres for linguistic standards.
