Uli Reich and Ronald Beline Mendes 10 Sociolinguistics Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the current state of Brazilian sociolin- guistic research. The complex nature of Brazilian society is itself seen as the main rea- son for the impressive wealth and diversity of work in this area throughout the coun- try. We identify some of the most important centers, sketch some theoretical particularities of Brazilian sociolinguistics, and describe several large-scale projects. Some issues are traced from their initial dialectological descriptions to Labovian quantitative approaches and beyond to indexical fields in urban societies, which set the stage for future research. Keywords: sociolinguistics, Brazilian Portuguese, language variation, language change, variable rules, parametric sociolinguistics, indexical fields, urban sociolin- guistics, third wave sociolinguistics 1 Introduction Any attempt to offer a synthesis of the social reality of Portuguese in Brazil and the as- sociated linguistic research is a vast undertaking. Brazil is an enormous country, whose formation was configured by peoples from the four corners of the world, these from both forced and deliberate arrivals, and its demographic reality has constantly changed in waves of internal migration (see also ↗2 The social history of Brazilian Portuguese and ↗3 The history of linguistic contact underlying Brazilian Portuguese). Its different geographic regions are thus very diverse—economically, culturally and, consequently, linguistically. Its large cities, some of which are amongst the most highly populated megalopolises in the world, condense this diversity locally and pro- ject it onto scales of social values which are in constant renegotiation. Notwithstand- ing the many challenges that it poses, such complexity offers the perfect scenario for the study of language variation and its social meanings, as well as language change. In this chapter, we provide a concise overview of sociolinguistic research in Brazil, and although our description seeks to offer a representative view, it certainly cannot claim to be exhaustive. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what we describe here constitutes merely the tips of several icebergs, this because even if we were to over- look the dialectological beginnings (see section 2.1) and thus only consider work that generally followed Labov (1966), it would be impossible to cover the full spectrum of sociolinguistic research that has developed in the country and which focusses not only on the production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) variables, but also on perceptions and attitudes toward its varieties and other languages (see, for example, Bugel 2006), as well as studies in accommodation and language contact—both between varieties of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110405958-011