Considerações sociolinguísticas sobre o uso do ‘vos’ no oriente boliviano

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the use of ‘vos’ in the Bolivian East, more specifically in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Based on a corpus composed of audio recordings of whatsapp conversations between parents and offspring, our aim is to verify whether the form for the second-person pronoun used is compatible with the expected situational variation. For the analysis, the Linguistic Variation Theory (LABOV, 1966, 1972) was used. The results showed that the pronoun ‘vos’ is commonly used in the Bolivian East, expressing not only familiarity, but also affection and trust.