Pajubá as a sociolinguistic laboratory for the twenty-first century

Abstract

This article proposes an understanding of Pajubá as a privileged sociolinguistic laboratory for investigating language in the twenty-first century. Contrary to perspectives that reduce it to slang, a restricted code or a marginal linguistic repertoire, the study argues that Pajubá constitutes a socially regulated linguistic system whose organization enables the integrated observation of linguistic variation, performativity, indexicality, linguistic legitimacy, and discursive resistance. Grounded in Variationist Sociolinguistics, particularly the contributions of William Labov and Anthony Julius Naro, and developed in dialogue with Queer Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study is based on the hypothesis that Pajubá broadens the analytical possibilities of contemporary Sociolinguistics by demonstrating the inseparability of language, body, identity, and power. The research adopts a qualitative approach based on a descriptive online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews conducted with fifty LGBTQIAPN+ participants from five Brazilian metropolitan areas. The corpus was interpreted through the combined theoretical frameworks of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Queer Linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, with particular attention to the meanings participants attribute to their own linguistic practices. The findings demonstrate that Pajubá displays systematic patterns of use, context-sensitive mechanisms of linguistic variation, and a strong capacity to construct social belonging, functioning simultaneously as a linguistic repertoire, a performative practice, and a technology of resistance against linguistic prejudice and symbolic violence. The study concludes that Pajubá constitutes a privileged site for understanding contemporary transformations in language and reinforces the need to broaden the epistemological horizons of Sociolinguistics through the study of historically marginalized linguistic repertoires.
Keywords: Pajubá. Sociolinguistic Laboratory. Variationist Sociolinguistics.