This article deals with the Project Linguistic Atlas of Brazil, paying special attention to its antecedents which, in the history of Brazilian Geolinguistics, explain its appearance in 1996, by the time of the Ways and Perspectives for Brazilian Geolinguistics Seminar, held at the Federal University of Bahia, that counted on the participation of researchers of this field of knowledge, mainly authors of published and yet to be published atlases. The article presents information about the Project, its goals, how the field research has been done, the stage it is at, presently with 92,8% of localities already researched, and the results that preliminary analyses have shown. Two aspects of its organization are evident: the regular meetings of the National Committee that coordinates the Project (the last one, numbered XXXIV, took place in February, 2012) and workshops for discussion, work assistance and the formation of inquirers and assistant researchers. From the methodological point of view, the Project belongs to the contemporary pluridimensional geolinguistics, and it prioritizes not only the diatopic variation, but also the diagenerational, diageneric and diastratic variation.
Linguistic Atlas of Brazil; Geolinguistics; Diatopic variation; Linguistic variation