“Tu” and “Você” in the Portuguese spoken in the state of Alagoas
Tu. Você. Linguistic Variation. Portuguese Spoken. Alagoas
This research aims to analyze the use of the second person singular forms, “Tu” and “Você”, in the subject position in Portuguese spoken in the state of Alagoas, seeking to verify if there is a process of variation or linguistic change, in cities of its three Mesoregions: East, Agreste and Sertão, tracing an overview of the phenomenon in the state, through informants from the cities of Maceió, Palmeira dos Índios and Piranhas. To this end, we base our investigation on the theoretical-methodological model of Variationist Sociolinguistics, proposed by Labov (2008), which analyzes the relationship between spoken language and the social context of the linguistic community. The research corpus consisted of data collected from induced dialogues with everyday themes common to the informants, according to the methodology proposed in Mota (2008), with 60 informants from Alagoas in dialogues established through symmetrical interpersonal relationships. After recordings, the data were statically treated using the GoldVarb program package. The independent variables listed for our analysis are gender, informer's location and education level, as social factors; verb tense and sentence type were selected as linguistic factors that may influence the use of one or another variant.