Central northeastern Portuguese

The central northeastern dialect of Brazilian Portuguese is a dialect spoken in the central part of the Northeast Region, Brazil, in all the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Alagoas and Sergipe, much of the state of Pernambuco, north of Bahia, south of Ceará, southeastern of Piauí and a few regions of Maranhão. It has roughly about 53,000,000 native speakers and varies within the region. This dialect shares similarities between north coast, Baiano and Recifense dialects.

Main features

Predominant use of voiced and voiceless dental stops before close front unrounded vowel even in final syllables "de" and "te", like presente and diário .
Palatalization predominant of fricatives and in and before voiceless and voiced alveolar stops, and also, but less often, before the denti-alveolar lateral approximant and the denti-alveolar nasal, like poste, desde, os navios, and dois lados .
Debuccalization of syllable-final and in colloquial speech to the glottal fricatives and, like mesmo and eu fiz tudo .
Debuccalization of the letter "v" in colloquial speech to the voiced glottal fricative, in some of the verbal forms of the verbs "Ir", "Vir" and "Ver", like Vamo? or, Tu vem? and Vai te embora! .
In "des", "dis", "tes" or "tis" syllables, there are voiced alveolar sibilant affricate and voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate : idades and partes .
Voiced glottal fricative and voiceless glottal fricative are present in the sound of the letter "r". None of the two phonemes occur at the end of words. Examples: corda, rabo and barragem, querer .
Opening of the pre-tonic vowels and to and most of these syllables with vowels: rebolar .

IPA for Central northeastern Portuguese

This key also serves, for the most part, to the north coast and recifense dialects. But the dialects cited here do not have the phoneme /d͡z/ and /t͡s/, characteristic of the central northeastern dialect. Recifense dialect usually palatalizes fricatives in any syllabic consonant meeting and not only before /d/ and /t/. Moreover, in certain regions of southeastern of Piauí and Maranhão west coast also a greater or lesser palatalization of fricatives may occur under the influence of Amazonian dialects, and even the absence of such palatalization. That is, in some areas the sound is alveolar, and in others postalveolar /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. In north coast dialect, also virtually no dental stops before /i/, /j/ or /ĩ/, and in its place they use postalveolar affricates. In contrast, the central northeastern dialect has almost exclusive predominance of dental stops before /i/, /j/ or /ĩ/. And the postalveolar affricates are used only in the following cases: in words of foreign origin in the Portuguese language, especially English; in words denoting slang and regionalisms; and phonemes are present in the standard variety of Brazilian Portuguese, are also often in television media to replace the dental stops.

Consonants

¹After the vowels /i/ or /ĩ/ and semivowel /j/.
²Used in plural words ending in "des", "dis", "tes" and "tis".
³Between the end and the beginning of syllables.
⁴At the beginning of words and the digraph "rr".
⁵Also in palatalization of /z/ before /d/.
⁶Phonetic junction between /k/ and /s/.
⁷Allophone of /l/ before /i/ and /ĩ/.
⁸Also in palatalization of /s/ before /t/.

Marginal phonemes

IPA	Examples	English approximation
dʒ ¹	jeans, diabo, tédio	change
tʃ ¹	tchau, capuccino, moléstia	cheese

¹ Only in words of foreign origin in the Portuguese language, in words denoting slang, regionalisms and optionally the grapheme "di" and "ti" that are in post-tonic syllables with rising diphthongs, and phonemes are present in the standard variety of Brazilian Portuguese, are also often in television media to replace the dental stops.

Vowels and semivowels

IPA	Graphemes	Examples	English approximation
a	a	arroz	car or time
ɐ	a	cama	nut
ɐ̃	a, am, an, ã	manhã, arrumação, dança, bamba	nasal /ɐ/
e	e, ê	loteria, glacê	says
ɛ	e, é	serra, pé	set
ẽ	e, em, en	pente, exemplo, energia	nasal /e/
i	e, i	repentista, país, tarde	emission or see
ɪ ¹	e	segunda, escola, menino	big
ĩ	i, im, in	cinto, vinho	nasal /i/
o	o, ô	rolinha, sopro, vô	sole
ɔ	o, ó	rebolar	ball or lot
õ	om, on, õ	arrombado, cone	nasal /o/
u	u, ú	jur'ubeba, ju'á,	food
ʊ ¹	o	botão, boneco	good
ũ	um, un	lundu, mussum	nasal /u/
j	i, nh	jeito, série	you or boy
w	l, u	pau, alto, guarda, quase	want or low

¹Substitution for unstressed vowels /e/ and /o/.