Carioca


Carioca is a demonym used to refer to anything related to the City of Rio de Janeiro as well as its eponymous State of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. The original word, "kara'i oka", comes from the indigenous Tupi language meaning "house of carijó", which was Guaraní, a native tribe of Rio de Janeiro who lived in the vicinity of the Carioca River, between the neighborhoods of Glória and Flamengo.
Like other Brazilians, cariocas speak Portuguese. The carioca accent and sociolect are one of the most widely recognized in Brazil, in part because Rede 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, feature carioca-acting and -speaking talent.

History

The archaic demonym for the Rio de Janeiro State is fluminense, taken from the Latin word flūmen, meaning "river." Despite the fact that carioca is a more ancient demonym of Rio de Janeiro's inhabitants, it was replaced by fluminense in 1783, when the latter was sanctioned as the official demonym of the Royal Captainship 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, carioca remained only as a nickname by which other Brazilians called the inhabitants of Rio. During the first years of the Brazilian Republic, carioca was 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, when the capital city was moved to Brasilia, was carioca made a co-official demonym with guanabarino. In 1975, the Guanabara State was eliminated by President Geisel, becoming the present-day City of Rio de Janeiro, and carioca was made the demonym of its municipality. Despite the fact carioca is not recognized as an official demonym of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazilians call the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro in general cariocas, and most of its inhabitants claim to be cariocas. Nowadays, social movements like "Somos Todos Cariocas" try to achieve the official recognition of carioca as a co-official demonym of the Rio de Janeiro State.

Accomplishments and influence

Carioca people have invented a few sports; the most famous is footvolley.
Cariocas are credited with creating the bossa nova style of music.
Famous cariocas in film include "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda, a Portuguese woman who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. An eponymous song from 1933, Carioca, has become a jazz standard.
Carnaval Carioca is the Portuguese name for the largest Brazilian Carnival, the Rio Carnival.
Samba Carioca is a localized style of Brazilian Samba.
There is an exercise drill used for dynamic stretching called Carioca. It consists of a repeating Samba dance step.

Sociolect

The Portuguese spoken across the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo and neighboring towns in Minas Gerais and in the city of Florianópolis, has similar features, hardly different from one another so cities such as Paraty, Resende, Campos dos Goytacazes, Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Vila Velha and Linhares may 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.
The Brazilian Portuguese variant spoken in the city of Rio de Janeiro is called carioca, and it is called sotaque locally, literally translated as "accent". It can be said that Rio de Janeiro presents a sociolect inside the major fluminense-capixaba dialect, 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 of the Portuguese language:
  1. Coda and can be pronounced as palato-alveolar and of English or the alveolo-palatal and of Catalan. That is inherited from European Portuguese, and carioca shares it only with Florianopolitano and some other Fluminense accents. In the northern tones of Brazilian Portuguese, not all coda and become postalveolar.
  2. , as well what would be coda in European Portuguese, may be realized as various voiceless and voiced guttural-like sounds, most often the latter, 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, the voiceless pharyngeal fricative and the uvular trill:, ,,,,, and. That diversity of allophones of a single rhotic phoneme is rare not just in Brazilian Portuguese but also among most world languages.
  3. The consonants and before or final unstressed become affricates and , respectively. Originally probably from Tupi influence, through the Portuguese post-creole that appeared in southeastern Brazil after the ban of Língua Geral Paulista as a marker of Jesuit activity by the Marquis of Pombal, this is now common place in Brazilian Portuguese, as it spread with the bandeiras paulistas, expansion of mineiros to 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 original bandeirantes 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. Historical , which merged with coda in Caipira, has undergone labialization to, and then vocalized to ; Nevertheless, with the exception of be the one used in Southern Brazil and São Paulo instead of, both commonly transcribed as ; the process is now nearly ubiquitous in Brazilian Portuguese so only some areas retain velarized lateral alveolar approximant or the retroflex approximant as coda.
The traits, 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. The chiado of 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. Affrication is today widespread, if not nearly omnipresent among young Brazilians, and coda guttural r is also found nationwide 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.
Another common characteristic of carioca speech is, in a stressed final syllable, the addition of /j/ before coda /s/. The change may have originated in the Northeast, where pronunciations such as Jesus have long been heard. Also immigration from Northeastern Brazil and Spanish immigration causes debuccalization of the coda sibilant: mesmo. 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 and as well as other consonants, primarily.
There are some grammatical characteristics of this sociolect as well, an important one is the mixing of second person pronouns você and tu, even in the same speech. For instance, while normative Portuguese requires lhe as the oblique for você and te as oblique for tu, in carioca slang, the once formal você is used for all cases. In informal speech, the pronoun tu is retained, but with the verb forms belonging to the form você: Tu foi na festa?. So the verbal forms are the same for both você and tu.
Many cariocas and many paulistas shorten você and use cê instead: Cê vai pra casa agora?. That, however, is common only on the spoken language and is rarely written.
Slang words among youngsters from Rio de Janeiro include caraca! , e aê? and qualé/quaé/coé?, and maneiro and sinistro. 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.