Variation and Idiosyncrasy in Bavarian and Brazilian Portuguese

LMU team: Prof. Paul O’Neill, Prof. Lars Bülow, Prof. Andreas Dufter

São Paulo team: Profª Gladis Massini-Cagliari (State University of São Paulo), Profª Livia Oushiro (State University of Campinas), Profª Rosanne de Andrade Berlink (State University of São Paulo)

Funding (60.000 €): Bayerisches Hochschulzentrum für Lateinamerika (BAYLAT) in cooperation with FAPESP

The project is organised around two workshops which are specifically designed for PhD students close or about to submit their doctoral theses or Early Career Researchers within 10 years of having submitted their theses. Funding is available to cover the expenses of students to attend the workshops in both Munich and Brazil.

Summary of Project

This project is focussed on, though not limited to, a comparative linguistic analysis of varieties of Bavarian and Brazilian Portuguese. Despite the obvious differences between Bavarian and Brazilian Portuguese, relating to linguistic typology, number of speakers and status as an official language, recent research has revealed a particular linguistic similarity: the prevalence of what seems to be idiosyncratic individual variation within and across speakers which is not consistently identifiable with any social meaning (Bülow & Pfenninger, 2021; Entringer, 2021; O’Neill, 2024; O’Neill & Ugartemendía, in press; Vergeiner et al., 2024; Werth et al., 2021).

This particular type of variation is problematic within linguistic theory since the general assumption of both formal and functional theories of language is that variation is (a) systematically structured, either grammatically or socially (Weinreich et al., 1968) and (b) individual variation is insignificant (Labov, 1966: 412; 2006: 508), unless it aligns with some socially meaningful groupings (age, class etc) or is indicative of how speakers manipulate meaningful variants to construct different personas, styles and identities (Eckert, 2012). Idiosyncratic individual variation which is not consistently identifiable with any social meaning is therefore either treated as ‘noise’ to be ignored or as indicative of a lack of research to uncover the social and/grammatical correlates (Guy & Hinskens, 2016; Kopf & Weber, 2023).

In this project, we tackle the question of idiosyncratic variation directly, looking at not only the theoretical implications of such variation but also methodological issues relating to ways to observe, collect and analyse it. These methodological issues are important since a number of authors (Dąbrowska, 2012, 2018; Dorian, 2010a, 2010b; O’Neill, 2024) have pointed out that researchers have difficulty in discerning and acknowledging this type of variation due to ingrained theoretical assumptions about variation being ordered or their background within highly standardised languages.

One reason that a background in standardised languages may hinder appreciation of this kind of variability in language is that standardisation often acts as a leveller of linguistic variation. Indeed, the majority of studies highlighting idiosyncratic variation have come for small language communities and minority languages. It has even been argued that such widespread, socially neutral variation arises from the social structures typical of small or minority language communities—namely, small or shrinking speaker populations, minimal socioeconomic differentiation, weak engagement with a written standard and/or convergence towards a dominant standard language (Dorian, 2010a: 238). Whilst some of these criteria apply to the social contexts in which varieties of Bavarian are spoken, Brazil—at first sight—categorically does not meet them (however, see O’Neill and Ugartemendía (2025) for reasons why it might). A comparative study, therefore, focussed on a shared linguistic phenomenon between Brazilian Portuguese and Bavarian, which seem to be different on so many levels, has the potential to offer valuable insights into how language variation functions within and across both individuals and societies.

The Specific Aims of the project are the following:

• make young researchers aware of more recent trends in theoretical and empirical linguistics which are questioning long-held assumptions
• highlight how data from Bavarian and Brazilian Portuguese can be extremely relevant to important international debates in linguistics
• introduce researchers to advanced quantitative techniques and variationist methods and thus equip young scholars with the analytical tools necessary to engage critically with non-canonical data and to contribute meaningfully to ongoing theoretical discussions in linguistics
• establish links for future cooperation between Universities in Bavaria and Brazil by foregrounding the similarities that exist in the seemingly typologically different data
• highlight the potential benefits and impact of collaborative research across diverse linguistic contexts to broaden theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives, and contribute to rethinking foundational models in linguistics.

Application Process, Eligibility Criteria and Deadlines: TBC

References

Bülow, L., & Pfenninger, S. E. (2021). Introduction: Reconciling approaches to intra-individual variation in psycholinguistics and variationist sociolinguistics. Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0027

Dąbrowska, E. (2012). Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment. Linguistic approaches to bilingualism, 2(3), 219-253. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.2.3.01dab

Dąbrowska, E. (2018). Experience, aptitude and individual differences in native language ultimate attainment. Cognition, 178, 222-235.

Dorian, N. C. (2010a). Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385939.001.0001

Dorian, N. C. (2010b). Socially Neutral Linguistic Variation: Where, Why, What For, and How? In: Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting (pp. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385939.003.0008

Eckert, P. (2012). Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 87-100. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145828

Entringer, N. (2021). Inter- and Intra-individual Variation in Luxembourgish. A Quantitative Analysis of Crowd-sourced Speech Data. In A. Werth, L. Bülow, S. E. Pfenninger, & M. Schiegg (Eds.), Intra-individual Variation in Language (1st edition. ed., Vol. 363, pp. 243-282.). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110743036

Guy, G. R., & Hinskens, F. (2016). Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and speech communities. Lingua, 172-173 (March-April 2016), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2016.01.001

Kopf, K., & Weber, T. (2023). Free Variation in Grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches (1 ed., Vol. 234). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234

Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City [Center for Applied Linguistics]. Washington, DC.

Labov, W. (2006). The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618208

O’Neill, P. (2024). Monoglossic ideologies and the two-way relationship between linguistics and language learning/teaching: Idiosyncratic variation in Brazilian Portuguese and its challenges for usage-based teaching. Ampersand, 1-14.

O’Neill, P., & Ugartemendía, C. (in press). Morphological variation in Brazilian imperatives: the importance of ecological factors and the relationship with the written standard. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics.

Vergeiner, P. C., Wallner, D., & Bülow, L. (2024). Language change in real-time: 40 years of lectal coherence in the Central Bavarian dialect-standard constellation of Austria. In K. V. Beaman & G. Guy (Eds.), The Coherence of Linguistic Communities: Orderly Heterogeneity and Social Meaning. Routledge.

Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. I. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics (pp. 97-195). Colombia University.

Werth, A., Bülow, L., Pfenninger, S. E., & Schiegg, M. (2021). Intra-individual Variation in Language (1st edition. ed., Vol. 363). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110743036