Lecture | This Time for Africa! series
Ideophones in Brazilian Portuguese: focusing on Afro-diasporic contexts in Brazil
- Gabriella S. Oliveira (University of São Paulo (USP))
- Date
- Friday 28 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- This Time for Africa! series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
This talk examines aspects of ideophones in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), focusing on African diasporic contexts. First, it will highlight some of the characteristics of the African diaspora in Brazil, such as Afro-brazilian religions, as Candomblé and Umbanda, and maroon communities, known as quilombos. Then, it will illustrate how ideophones, “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2019), are being used in a quilombo community, in relation to the ones in Brazilian Portuguese outside the diasporic contexts. For the data analysed, multimodal recordings of spontaneous oral narratives were selected, from the people living in Quilombos de Paracatu, a region in the hinterlands of Brazil. They were recorded by Museu da Pessoa, a collaborative and virtual museum in which everyone in Brazil can tell and have their stories recorded, and these stories were further analysed. The results show that there is a lack of evidence to correlate the ideophones in use in these quilombos to language contact, however it does show how they articulate depicitive and iconic devices in similar ways as ideophones elsewhere does. These findings contribute to the field with innovative data and call attention to the importance of studying both ideophonicity in use and contact situations in the diaspora.