The objective of this phonetic-phonological research is to describe the raising process of the
mid pretonic vowels /e/ and /o/ in the Portuguese spoken by the inhabitants of Tucurui, a
town in Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, who are originally from Maranhão, a northeastern
Brazilian state, and their descendants. The quantitative sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972) whow
was employed to study the dialectal variations within the speech community where the
research was carried out. Bortoni-Ricardo’s (1985) procedures to study reference groups were
used to compose the sample. Samples of speech of 36 participants in the research were
divided into two groups (anchorage and control) and classified by age and sex for analysis.
PRAAT Program and the GOLDVARB X Program were used to segment and analyze the 1.720
occurrences of the target variables. The results indicate that the rule of vowel raising of the
studied variable does not apply (32.1% for /e/ and 17.7% for /o/). Five groups of factors were
selected for the study of /e/ and seven for the study of /o/. According to the results, the raising
of mid pretonic vowels is favored due to the presence of: a high vowel (.62 for /e/ and .88 for
/o/); a nasalized tonic vowel (.71 for /e/ and /o/), a nasalized pretonic vowel (.68 for /e / and
.86 for o/).
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