This chapter studies the Brazilian Portuguese keywords subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’. Despite formal similarities, the English cityscape word suburb conveys a very different concept than subúrbio. In dictionaries, the cultural semantics of the words subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’ is largely missing. This is unfortunate since the semantic richness of these words shed light on Brazilian discourses of urbanism and on a culturally-specific way of categorising people in the urban space. Using evidence from a range of different Brazilian discourses and speakers’ reflections on the two words, I propose a semantic explication for each, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to adequately account for the complex and cultural meaning of the words – seen from an insider’s perspective.

Kalunga is a variety of Afro-Portuguese spoken in a rural community located in the state of Goiás, Brazil. In this study, we compare Kalunga with other varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal and Portuguese-based creoles from a contact linguistics perspective. We investigate typological similarities, differences, and possible connections between these varieties. The results support previous sociohistorical and linguistic studies that reveal significant differences between Kalunga and standardized varieties of Portuguese, and the typological distinction between creoles, more vernacular varieties, and more standard varieties.

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