Carioca

Carioca ( ) is a demonym used to refer to anything related to the City of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. The original word, "kara'i oka", comes from the indigenous Tupi language meaning "house of carijó", which was Guaraní, a native tribe of Rio de Janeiro who lived in the vicinity of the Carioca River, between the neighborhoods of "Glória" and "Flamengo".
Like other Brazilians, "cariocas" speak Portuguese. The "carioca" accent and sociolect (also simply called "carioca", see below) are one of the most widely recognized in Brazil, in part because Rede Globo, the second-largest television network in the world, is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, many Brazilian TV programs, from news and documentary to entertainment (such as the telenovelas), feature "carioca"-acting and -speaking talent.
History.
The archaic demonym for the Rio de Janeiro State is "fluminense", taken from the Latin word "flūmen", meaning "river." Despite the fact that "carioca" is a more ancient demonym of Rio de Janeiro's inhabitants (known since 1502), it was replaced by "fluminense" in 1783, when the latter was sanctioned as the official demonym of the Royal Captainship of Rio de Janeiro (later the Province of Rio de Janeiro). A few years after the City of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro had become the capital city of the Brazilian colonies. From 1783 and during all the Imperial Regime, "carioca" remained only as a nickname by which other Brazilians called the inhabitants of Rio (city and province). During the first years of the Brazilian Republic, "carioca" was the name given to those who lived in the slums or a pejorative way to refer to the bureaucratic elite of the Federal District. Only when the City of Rio lost its status as Federal District and became a Brazilian State (Guanabara State), when the capital city was moved to Brasilia, was "carioca" made a co-official demonym with "guanabarino". In 1975, the Guanabara State was eliminated by President Geisel (under the military dictatorship), becoming the present-day City of Rio de Janeiro, and "carioca" was made the demonym of its municipality. Despite the fact "carioca" is not recognized as an official demonym of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazilians call the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro in general (state and city) "cariocas", and most of its inhabitants claim to be "cariocas". Nowadays, social movements like "Somos Todos Cariocas" ("We are all Cariocas") try to achieve the official recognition of "carioca" as a co-official demonym of the Rio de Janeiro State.
Accomplishments and influence.
"Carioca" people have invented a few sports; the most famous is footvolley.
"Cariocas" are credited with creating the bossa nova style of music.
Famous "cariocas" in film include "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda, a Portuguese woman who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. An eponymous song from 1933, "Carioca", has become a jazz standard.
"Carnaval Carioca" is the Portuguese name for the largest Brazilian Carnival, the Rio Carnival.
"Samba Carioca" is a localized style of Brazilian Samba.
There is an exercise drill used for dynamic stretching called "Carioca". It consists of a repeating Samba dance step.
Sociolect.
The Portuguese spoken across the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo and neighboring towns in Minas Gerais and in the city of Florianópolis, has similar features, hardly different from one another so cities such as Paraty, Resende, Campos dos Goytacazes, Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Vila Velha and Linhares may be said to have the same dialect as Rio de Janeiro, as they are hardly perceived as strong regional variants by people from other parts of Brazil.
The Brazilian Portuguese variant spoken in the city of Rio de Janeiro (and metropolitan area) is called "carioca", and it is called "sotaque" locally, literally translated as "accent". It can be said that Rio de Janeiro presents a sociolect inside the major "fluminense-capixaba" dialect, as speakers inside the city may be easily recognizable more by their slang than the way the phonology of their speech, which is closer to the standard Brazilian Portuguese in the media than other variants. It is known especially for several distinctive traits new to either variant (European or Brazilian) of the Portuguese language:
The traits (particularly the "chiado", a palatalization process that creates a postalveolar pronunciation of coda "s" and "z" and affricate pronunciation of and and "te" and "de" rhymes), as a whole and consistent among the vast majority of speakers, were once specifically characteristic of Rio de Janeiro speech and distinguished particularly from the pronunciation of São Paulo and areas further south, which formerly had adapted none of the characteristics. The "chiado" of the coda sibilant is thought to date from the early 1800s occupation of the city by the Portuguese royal family, as European Portuguese had a similar characteristic for the postalveolar codas.
More recently, however, all of the traits have spread throughout much of the country by the cultural influence of the city that diminished the social marker character the lack of palatalization once had (apart of assimilation of the caboclo minorities in most of South and Southeast Brazil). Affrication is today widespread, if not nearly omnipresent among young Brazilians, and coda guttural r is also found nationwide (their presence in Brazil is a general heritage of Tupi speech too) but less among speakers in the 5 southernmost states other than Rio de Janeiro, and if accent is a good social indicator, 95-105 million Brazilians consistently palatalize coda sibilant in some instances (but as in Rio de Janeiro, it is only a marker of adoption of foreign phonology at large in Florianópolis and Belém: palatalization, as in any other Romance language, is a very old process in Portuguese and its lacking in some dialect rather than reflecting a specific set of Galician, Spanish and indigenous influences on their formation).
Another common characteristic of "carioca" speech is, in a stressed final syllable, the addition of /j/ before coda /s/ ("mas", "dez" may become , which can also be noted ambiguously as ). The change may have originated in the Northeast, where pronunciations such as "Jesus" have long been heard. Also immigration from Northeastern Brazil and Spanish immigration causes debuccalization of the coda sibilant: "mesmo" . Many Brazilians assume that is specific to Rio, but in the Northeast, debuccalization has long been a strong and advanced phonological process that may also affect onset sibilants and as well as other consonants, primarily .
There are some grammatical characteristics of this sociolect as well, an important one is the mixing of second person pronouns "você" and "tu", even in the same speech. For instance, while normative Portuguese requires "lhe" as the oblique for "você" and "te" as oblique for "tu", in "carioca" slang, the once formal "você" (now widespread as an informal pronoun in many Brazilian Portuguese varieties) is used for all cases. In informal speech, the pronoun "tu" is retained, but with the verb forms belonging to the form você: "Tu foi na festa?" ("Did you go to the party?"). So the verbal forms are the same for both "você" and "tu".
Many "cariocas" and many "paulistas" (from the coast, capital city or hinterland) shorten "você" and use "cê" instead: "Cê vai pra casa agora?" ("Are you going home now?"). That, however, is common only on the spoken language and is rarely written.
Slang words among youngsters from Rio de Janeiro include "caraca!" (gosh!) [now spread throughout Brazil], "e aê?" and "qualé/quaé/coé?" (literally "which is [it]", carrying a meaning similar to "What's up?"), "maneiro" ("cool", "fine", "interesting", "amusing"), "mermão" ("bro", contraction of "meu irmão"), "caô" (a lie), and "sinistro" (in standard Portuguese, "sinister"; in slang, "awesome," "terrific," but also "terrible," "troublesome," "frightening," "weird"). Many of these slang words can be found in practically all of Brazil by to cultural influence from the city. Much slang from Rio de Janeiro spreads across Brazil and may be not known as originally from there, and those less culturally accepted elsewhere are sometimes used to shun not only the speech of a certain subculture, age group or social class but also the whole accent.