The influence of Arabic on Brazilian Portuguese: the contribution of African slaves and the Lebanese immigration

Abstract

The relationship between Arabic and Portuguese in Brazil is seen beginning with two distinct historical moments. The first phase took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the slave trade introduced an African muslim population into the Brazilian slave society. The second occurred more recently, with the flow of immigrants from Syria and Lebanon, starting in the late nineteenth century, establishing a new stage in the history of interactions between two languages. The present article presents the Arabic words exchanged between the two languages as well as semantic fields in which they organize themselves, as evidence of areas in which they observe the interactions between the contact of these two linguistic communities. Theoretical and methodological purposes, find refuge in the Sociolinguistics of language contact, introduced by Weinreich (1953) and became itself as a work source Vocabulary of Arabic origin, systematized by Vargens (2006). There are twenty-five words introduced by African slaves in the semantic field 'religion,' and twelve words in the semantic field 'cooking,' made possible by the presence of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in this country.