This paper reports on the activities developed by the Study and Research Group on Sociolinguistics at the University of São Paulo. Aiming at positioning the city of São Paulo and its inhabitants, the Paulistanos (born and raised in this city), in the map of Brazilian Sociolinguistics, the group's works revolve mainly around the ongoing construction of a representative sample of Paulistano speech, which main goal is to answer the questions: "what does it mean to sound like a Paulistano?" and "which variables and variants characterize the Paulistano speech?". This new sample (SP2010) is to be made available (audio and transcriptions) on the Internet to the linguists' community. In addition to discussing the criteria that define such sample, this paper also addresses the challenges involved in its constitution. Moreover, it offers an overview of the researches that have been developed by utilizing the data (SP-Pilot) that was gathered in the preparation and training of the young sociolinguists that would work in the group. Finally, this paper also outlines paths for future work.
Language variation; Paulistanos; Identity; Corpus
