Some Santomeans use the strong-R (the historical trill) in word positions that would be considered non-standard to European and Brazilian norms. The results of the study show that the use of the rhotics is an innovative and distinctive feature of Santomean Portuguese. The study is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and sociolinguistic interviews with fifty-six native speakers of Santomean Portuguese, aged between 12 and 73 years old, who were born and raised in the capital of São Tomé and its surroundings. In a larger context, I am also interested in understanding the social and ideological phenomena that explain the linguistic choices, linguistic change, and language shift in São Tomé and Príncipe. The objective of this research, therefore, is to investigate the emergence of a Santomean variety of Portuguese, with special reference to rhotics and subject pronoun expression (SPE), and to explore the differences between Santomean Portuguese and other varieties of Portuguese. Since then, children have been growing up with the local variety of Portuguese as their first (and often only) language. This shift was intensified from the 1960s, with the rise of the nationalist movement, the independence of the country (in 1975), and the generalized access to education.

As a consequence, a process of linguistic shift (from creoles to Portuguese) started to take place.

However, the massive arrivals of contract laborers starting at the end of the nineteethn century, and the use of Portuguese as a lingua franca completely changed the sociolinguistic setting. From the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Forro, Angolar, and Lung’ie (three native creoles) were the most widely spoken languages on the islands. This dissertation focuses on the variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé, the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe, and its surroundings. Acadian French, Costa Rican Spanish) as well as in Europe (e.g. Considering Brazil’s multiethnic and linguistically diverse society during colonization, it should come to no surprise that the r-like sounds ended up on a diachronic path that resulted in retroflection, as this process has occurred in several other Romance varieties in the New World (e.g. perception, acquisition and markedness) and relates these factors to Portuguese as well as Romance rhotics, mentioning several plausible evolutions from Latin generally associated to weakening, neutralization and posteriorization.

This analysis discusses some pertinent issues that encompass retroflection in general (i.e. In the past, the origins of retroflection have been attributed to the African languages brought to the new world through slavery as well as indigenous languages, although these theories have since been discarded. Several varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are phonetically distinct from the rest of Portuguese-speaking world in that they contain a retroflex consonant.

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