Denominations for the risk of light that cuts through the sky on the data from the Atlas Linguistic Project of Brazil

Abstract

This work aims to describe the lexical variation observed in the corpus of the Atlas Linguistic Project of Brazil (ALiB Project), for the risk of light that cuts across the sky, also known as “shooting star”. The analyzed data were collected through linguistic surveys carried out in loco by the team of dialectologists from the ALiB Project with the contribution of 48 informants from six Brazilian capitals, belonging to the North Region of the country, stratified by sex, age range and education, in order to verify the linguistic use and document the lexical diversity of the Portuguese spoken in these localities, following the principles of Multidimensional Geolinguistics. The focus is given to question 031 of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire (QSL) of the ALiB Project, which is formulated as follows: “At night, one can often observe a star that moves in the sky, like this (mimic) and makes a risk of light. What do you call it”? (COMITÊ NACIONAL..., 2001, p.23). Responses will be assessed with a view to corroborating whether the highlighted social factors directly interfere with the language choices of these speakers.