Vergleichende Phonetik – Deutsch/brasilianisches Portugiesisch: Stand der Forschung am Anfang des 21 Jahrhunderts

The aim of this paper is to present a panorama of studies on the language pair German-Brazilian Portuguese in the field of phonetics/phonology and to find out whether and to what extent the research results have been integrated into the training of teachers of German as a foreign language. For this purpose, a textbook used at many Brazilian universities was first examined as an example. In addition, an attempt was made to consider all existing studies in Portuguese that have dealt with the phonetics of both languages from a contrastive perspective. Studies published in German on the subject – both in the field of German as a foreign language and in (applied) linguistics – were also consulted. Here, special attention was paid to the discussion on the speech rhythm of Brazilian Portuguese, which has been controversial for several years. Although there is a relative consensus for German that it is an accent-counting language, researchers still seem to disagree on whether Brazilian Portuguese should be counted among the syllable-counting languages (Barbosa 2000). In our opinion, this discussion is important if the goal is to study the speech rhythm of Brazilian learners of German in order to draw conclusions for teacher training.