"I hope these lines will find you in good health"

sibilance in personal letters written by a Portuguese bride

Abstract

In the first decades of the 20th century, during the conflicts of the First World War, many letters were written and sent to soldiers on the front lines of this conflict. In this paper, we will present a sample of nine letters written by a Portuguese bride to her fiancé, a Portuguese soldier from the Corpo Expedicionário Português in France, and investigate the variability in the written register of sibilants sounds in these letters. Teyssier (1997) shows us that, in Portugal, the sibilant system varied depending on the region where the speakers were located. This diversity was, for many years, reflected in the way people wrote and this caused the sibilants sounds to be represented by <s> or <ç>. In accordance with researches with personal letters (cf. RUMEU, 2010) and the methodology of Historical Sociolinguistics research (ROMAINE, 2009), we searched this writer's social network (cf. MILROY, 1987) for signs of the normative/grammatical pressure in vogue at the time. Although our results do not show that those close to the author had an influence on her writing style, a quick socio- historical investigation shows us that the instability between <s> and <ç> for the sibilant sounds, found in the letters of this Portuguese bride, has its roots in the little access to formal education and the limitations imposed on women at the time.