Spoken linguistic databases - especially those designed for research with a Variationist Sociolinguistics approach - has been a privileged source for the description of Brazilian Portuguese. In this paper, we discuss methodological procedures that should be adopted in the development of new databases. We trace a short retrospect on already established databases and propose the collection and expansion of corpora from different speech communities - and from different communities of practice. Eckert (2012) describes the three analytical practices most commonly embraced by sociolinguistics studies. Each one of these "three waves" (in Eckert´s terms) reflects distinct ways of approaching linguistic variation. We suggest strategies to standardize procedures in the development of databases taking into account the three waves of sociolinguistic inquiry, and we shed additional light on the third wave, still incipient in Brazil. The standardization of sociolinguistics databases would make contrastive investigations of different Brazilian dialects easier, contributing, in this way, to the proposition and refinement of generalizations and universal principles of variation and change.
Sociolinguistics; Databases; Linguistic variation and change; Social factors; Style
