Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 77- Conclusions and further research
This study of the lexical relationships between the European and Brazilian
Portuguese varieties in the last 60 years allows us to draw a few conclu-
sions. First, the results obtained for the fields of football and clothing differ
with regard to the main issue of the present study and illustrate the com-
plexity of the study of convergence and divergence between differing na-
tional varieties of a transcontinental language.
Second, the hypothesis of divergence is confirmed in the lexical field of
clothing but not in the lexical field of football. Clothing terms are more
representative of common vocabulary and, therefore, the results obtained
for clothing are probably closer to the sociolinguistic reality. The slight
convergence observed in the field of football between the 1950s and 1970s
is probably the effect of globalization and standardization of the vocabulary
of football. In fact, the global evolutionary relation between the two varie-
ties and the influence of internal linguistic features on the evolution are
clearer and more homogeneous in clothing terms than in football terms. As
a whole, there are a lot of differences between the two varieties: the uni-
formity value is only 57% in both lexical fields at the moment.
Third, it seems that there is no specific orientation from one of the varie-
ties towards the other. Both varieties diverge from each other in the voca-
bulary of clothing. The slight move of the Brazilian variety towards the
European variety in the vocabulary of football results mainly from the
adaptation of foreign borrowings that were massively introduced in their
original form in BP in the 1950s. The influence of the Brazilian variety on
the European variety, especially in the vocabulary of football, is not as
clear as expected.
Fourth, the Brazilian variety has changed more than the European varie-
ty: is the greater changeability of the Brazilian variety the effect of greater
external complexity and greater social variation or the effect of more recent
standardization? Most probably all of them play a part. On the other hand,
more changes occurred between the 1950s and the 1970s in both varieties
and in both lexical fields. Fifth, it is proven that the influence of English
and other foreign languages is stronger in the Brazilian variety: Brazilian
Portuguese imports a larger number of loanwords and adapts and integrates
them more easily than European Portuguese. Sixth, the clothing terms con-
firm the hypothesis of the synchronic stratificational asymmetry of the two
varieties, especially the hypothesis that the actual distance between the
standard and the substandard strata is higher in BP than in EP.