Variation and Diffusion of Uruguayan Portuguese in a Bilingual Border Town

In Northern Uruguay, along the Brazilian border, Portuguese was the only language spoken by the Portuguese and the Brazilian settlers. It was only at the end of the last century that Spanish was imposed upon the Portuguese speaking communities through state educational policies and language planning. Spanish was then brought to the border areas as a prestigious language, and rural Portuguese was maintained as the vernacular. This diglossic situation continues into the present; generally, Portuguese is employed in familiar circumstances, whereas Spanish is primarily the language of public life. However, as Elizaincín points out (1978: 304), while the entire population follows diglossic rules, patterns of language choice vary within this model according to the individual’s social status. Thus, while the working class uses Spanish only in situations where Spanish is required (work, education, church), and Uruguayan Portuguese in all in-group activities, the middle-class prefers to use Spanish most of the time. The greater use of the ‘official language’ by the middle class separates them from the lower social classes, and, as noted by Behares (1984), marks their status as a group who identifies with the national culture rather than with that of the border. Meanwhile, Uruguayan Portuguese works as a unifying factor for the working-class, signing solidarity and self identification with the local culture. My analysis indicates that besides language choice, internal variation within Uruguayan Portuguese also reflects this social stratification. Pedro Rona studied ‘fronterizo’, a variety spoken by monolinguals, which he defined as “una mezcla de portugués y español, pero que no es ni portugués ni español, y resulta con frecuencia ininteligible tanto para los brasileños como para los uruguayos” (1965: 7). Fritz Hensey, in 1972, adopted the term ‘fronterizo’ proposed by Rona to designate a “set of Portuguese dialects which are spoken in mostly rural sectors of Northern Uruguay often as a sole language”. However, he chose to study what he defined as “the Portuguese spoken by bilinguals in the town of Rivera”. Elizaincín rejected the term ‘fronterizo’ and proposed instead DPU (Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay), which he defined as “formas mixtas, de