Interferências de Línguas Moçambicanas em Português falado em Moçambique

Abstract

When two groups of people come into contact for a considerable period of time, as the case of Portuguese and the Mozambican, among other things, their languages end up influencing one another (Sapir 1921) through the emergence of some features of either language in the spoken discourse of one of the languages. In linguistics literature, when the linguistic feature of one language is generally present in the other language, that  phenomenon is called loan; yet when  sporadic and (almost) individual, it is called interference (Ngunga 2009), since the process of non-mother tongue acquisition implies using the phonic organs and  psychological processes shaped  to produce  mother tongue sounds and structures. This exercise may result in what language teachers call “errors”, which result from the transfer of mother tongue structures to the target language (Cardoso 2007). Based on the method of observation of over three decades, which consisted in listening, collection  and systematization  of the utterances produced by Mozambicans, the present paper studies  the interferences of Mozambican languages onto the Portuguese language, namely in the following fields: Phonetics, Phonology, Syntax and Semantics. The results of the study show that the sudden appearance of some features of Mozambican languages in the Portuguese language may affect the communication process in the latter. Therefore, the paper suggests some strategies to help the teacher in finding some exercises to minimize the learning difficulties the Mozambican non-mother speakers of Portuguese encounter when attempting to learn this language.