TYPOLOGY OF LINGUISTIC ATLAS: proposed (re)categorization for the Brazilian context

Abstract

The vast geospatial extension of Brazilian territory, combined with linguistic and social plurality, poses challenges to the creation of linguistic atlases, presenting a complex diversity for those who seek to describe the multiple facets of Portuguese and other languages through Geolinguistics. Since 1996, when the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB) was launched, there has been a robust growth in the production of atlases, developed as theses or dissertations, made possible by a solid base of geolinguistic work. It is also notable that geolinguistics in Brazil has become an area of interest and no longer an auxiliary method of dialectology. Based on these observations and the growth in the production of linguistic atlases with different perspectives, the aim of this study is to propose a typological (re)classification that expands Alinei’s (1994) proposal, aimed at European atlases, from four to eight categories: continental, language groups, national, regional, state, small domain/local, contact/frontier and historical-linguistic routes, according to the scope and purpose of these works. For this task, a bibliographic survey with a critical-descriptive objective was used methodologically, analyzing canonical and contemporary geolinguistic works, with an emphasis on productions from the Romance family.