This research object was the use of abbreviations in 18th century private letters written in Portuguese. In this context, the main hypothesis was that such resources may highlight the social aspects of the scribe of past periods, thus allowing their sociolinguistic characterization. To test it, we adopted the Language Variation and Change Theory (Labov, 1972) regarding the data selection, collection, and analysis. The corpus is composed of 24 private letters from the 18th century written in Portuguese Language of Brazil and European Portuguese by men and women of higher and lower social classes and are from two sources: (i) Fundo Barão de Camargos Collection, of the Historical Archive of the Museu of the Inconfidência, and (ii) Post Scriptum Project: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writing (Early Modern Portugal and Spain), of the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon. The results showed that (i) the external variables education level, socioeconomic status and gender and the internal variables typology and rule complexity interfered with the use of abbreviations; thus, (ii) the abbreviations translate linguistic and extralinguistic information about the one behind the quill and are a methodological tool for the characterization of the literacy degree of the scribe.

中文翻译：

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十八世纪字母的缩写：图形线索和识字度

该研究对象是 18 世纪葡萄牙语私人信件中缩写词的使用。在这种情况下，主要假设是这些资源可能突出了过去时期抄写员的社会方面，从而允许他们的社会语言学特征。为了测试它，我们采用了关于数据选择、收集和分析的语言变异和变化理论（Labov，1972）。该语料库由 18 世纪的 24 封私人信件组成，这些信件由不同社会阶层的男女用巴西葡萄牙语和欧洲葡萄牙语写成，有两个来源：(i) 历史档案馆的 Fundo Barão de Camargos 收藏Inconfidência 博物馆的馆长，以及 (ii) Post Scriptum 项目：普通写作的数字档案（早期现代葡萄牙和西班牙），里斯本大学语言学中心的。结果表明：（i）外部变量教育水平、社会经济地位和性别以及内部变量类型学和规则复杂性干扰了缩略语的使用；因此，(ii) 缩略语翻译关于羽毛笔背后的人的语言和语言外信息，是表征抄写员识字程度的一种方法工具。