The formation of the caipira dialect began with the arrival of the Portuguese in São Vicente in the sixteenth century. Ongoing research points to several influences, such as Galician-Portuguese, represented in some archaic aspects of the dialect, and the língua geral paulista, a Tupian Portuguese-like creole codified by the Jesuits. The westward colonial expansion by the Bandeirantes expedition spread the dialect throughout a dialectal and cultural continuum called Paulistania in the provinces of São Paulo, Mato Grosso, Goiás, and Minas Gerais. In the 1920s, the scholar Amadeu Amaral published a grammar and predicted the imminent death of the Caipira dialect, caused by urbanization and the coming wave of mass immigration resulting from the monoculture of coffee. However, the dialect survived in rural subculture, with music, folk stories, and a substratum in city-dwellers' speech, recorded by folklorists and linguists.
Sociolinguistics
Although the caipira accent originated in the state of São Paulo, the middle and upper class sociolect of the state capital is now a very different variety closer to standard Portuguese but with some Italian-influenced elements, and working-class paulistanos may sound somewhat like caipira to people of other parts of Brazil, such as Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Caipira is spoken mostly in the countryside.
Phonology
Phonetically, the most important differences in comparison with standard Brazilian Portuguese are the postalveolar or retroflex approximants for as allophone of European and paulistano in the syllable coda and the merger of into the semivowel, as in Spanish yeísmo. Coda is frequently modified into, instead of the used in most of Brazil. The most common coda ar allophones of caipira is not the same of those in urban areas of hinterland São Paulo and some speakers of the capital and the coast, alveolar approximant and r-colored vowel. Some caipira speakers may use those instead, and others may not merge into or may vocalize l. Rarer pronunciations include using approximants for all instances in which European speakers of Portuguese have, including the intervocallic and post-consonantal ones or using a palatal approximant instead of a rhotic approximant. That, while more common in the caipira area by its particular phonology, is more often associated with speech-language pathology. There are other important changes like these:
Morphology and syntax
There are some significant differences in caipira morphology and syntax:
The negative adverb não has distinct strong and weak forms: não in short replies, and num for negative phrases, but it is by no means restricted to the caipira area and is in the colloquial speech of Rio de Janeiro, for example.
In the plural, only the article or pronoun is inflected, and the adjective often remains uninflected: São Paulo city's Portuguese: essas coisas bonitas "those beautiful things" ↔ caipira: essas coisa bonita but it is by no means restricted to the caipira area and is a general trait of the so-called Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese.
Caipira is the Brazilian dialect by far most influenced by the línguas gerais, which is said to be a recent decreolization of them into a more standard Brazilian Portuguese. Nevertheless, the decreolization was successful, and despite all the differences, a speaker of Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese of other regions has no difficulty in understanding caipira at all, but foreigners who learned to deal only with standard lusitanizing Brazilian Portuguese may have as much difficulty with caipira as they would have with other colloquial and vernacular registers of the language.
Orthography
There is no standard orthography, and Brazilians are taught only the standard variant when learning Portuguese in schools. A nonstandard orthography intended to convey caipira pronunciation is featured prominently in the popular children's comic bookChico Bento, in which some characters speak in it.
