By URARIAN MOTA*
The extermination of regional speeches, in the voice of reporters and presenters
I had already written in Love Dictionary of Recife that television presenters are exterminating regional speech. This even happens on television in the northeastern states! The diverse, right/wrong ways of speaking that Manuel Bandeira already referred to in the verse “It came from the mouth of the people in the wrong language of the people/ The right language of the people”, here gains a status of nullification of identity, in which native presenters are ashamed of their own speech. Thus, local, “native” reporters refer to the pequi from Ceará as “pê-qui”, while farmers respond with a piqui.
What woke me up was a report about the traffic on Avenida Beberibe, in the Água Fria neighborhood, which I know so well. And I don't know if it was an awakening or a scandal.
At the time, the reporter, the presenter, and the announcements only called Beberibe Bê-Bê-ribe. What was that? It is historical, since childhood, that this avenue has always been called Bibiribe, even though it was and is written as Beberibe.
I called the TV newsroom in Recife. A journalist answered. I said, in my wrong way of speaking, as I would later learn. I said this absurdity, which I would later understand:
“- Dude, why do you say bê-bê-ribe instead of Bibiribe? – Because it’s correct, sir. Bé-Bé is Baby. – Seriously? Is the person who teaches us this a Portuguese language teacher? – No, sir. The person who teaches us this is a speech therapist.”
Oh, good. They certainly make mistakes. But then I could see that the speech therapist as an authority on the Portuguese language is an ignorance that comes from the matrix, there in Rio. In other words, this is what the research told me:
“In 1974, the Globo started training video reporters… During this period, speech therapist Glorinha Beuttenmüller started working at Globe. As Alice Maria, one of the creators of National Journal: “we felt the need for someone to guide their training so that they could speak naturally.”
It was at this time that Glorinha Beuttenmüller began to standardize the speech of reporters and announcers throughout the country, softening regional accents. In her work to “define a national standard, the speech therapist was guided by the decisions of a philology congress held in Salvador in 1956, in which it was agreed that the standard pronunciation of Portuguese spoken in Brazil would be that of Rio de Janeiro.”
But this is the death of the language. It is an extermination of regional speech, in the voices of reporters and presenters.
This “civilized” air of regional presenters would deserve a Molière. They pronounce, always under the guidance of a speech therapist, “mê-ninô” (small boy) and “bô-necÔ” (small boy), while the people, in the living history of the language, continue with mini-nu and doll. What used to be a change in accent, because on the small screen in the living room the presenters would speak “correct” Portuguese, has now reached something more serious: in their immense and inexhaustible ignorance, they have started to change the names of the region’s natural places.
The so-natural Pernambuco, which we call Pér-nambuco, is now pronounced on TV as Pêr-nambuco. And Petrolina, Pé-tró-lina, a city that is a reference in local development, has become something else: Pê-trô-lina. And yet another “Nobel” of television orthoepy: even the names of northeastern cities have changed and continue to change so much that, believe it or not, friends, I saw: knowing that they are aware of the regional tendency to transform the “o” into a “u”, a reporter renamed the city of Juazeiro in Bahia. It became JÔ-azeiro! Which makes sense: if people say JUazeiro, it could only be Jô-azeiro.
But today, talking over breakfast, it occurred to me that accent is also a reflection of social class. At the same time, it is the origin of discrimination against those who come from “below”, against “humble people”, as the non-humble people from “above” like to say. Or those who think they are in a higher place.
Then I remembered Pygmalion, the play by Bernard Shaw, later turned into a musical and film under the name My Fair Lady. The play tells the story of a young woman who sells flowers on the streets of London. But one night the young woman meets a learned phonetics professor, whose main occupation is to discover the origin of people just by their accent. When he hears the girl's "horrible" accent, he bets that he can transform the simple flower seller into a high society lady, "reeducating" her to the "cultured" standard of the language.
This is what regional television announcers say, disguised as speakers of the standard language of culture. Another language. In reality, a Frankenstein of class pronunciation.
*Urarian Mota is a writer and journalist. Author, among other books, of Soledad in Recife (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/4791Lkl]
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
