Contato linguístico e influências de línguas orais na Libras: uma análise a partir do léxico da Língua Brasileira de Sinais

Abstract

The Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), which is the main signed language in Brazil, shares the same geographic space with Brazilian Portuguese and has maintained with it a vast sociolinguistic interaction throughout history. The objective of this paper is to analyze the origin of the lexicon in Libras, using as corpus 4,607 entries of the first volume of the Dicionário da Língua de Sinais do Brasil, by Capovilla et alii (2017), to investigate the obligation of the Portuguese language in signs of Libras. We identified four lexical categories regarding origin: with iconicity; apparently arbitrary; oral language loans; deictics and pointing; and then we focused on the language loans that will be subdivided into lexicalized fingerspelling; initialized signs end semantic signs. We concluded that most signs are iconic in Libras, 61%, and that only a minority, approximately 13%, is influenced by the Portuguese language, all of them phonologically and morphologically adapted from an oral-auditory language to a visual-spatial language.