Cartography and Georeferencing in Geolinguistics: review and update of the dialectal divisions and network of points to be used in the Brazilian Linguistic Atlas proposed by Antenor Nascentes
Geolinguistics, Dialectal Areas, Cartography, Georeferencing, Geographic Information Systems
The studies on linguistic variations take into account diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, diagenerational and diassexual factors, as well as the relations between them. In Brazil, some suggestions for dialectal divisions have been formulated, particularly the one developed by Antenor Nascentes (1953) in the second edition of ‘O Linguajar Carioca’ (Nascentes, 1953). His study remains as the most quoted, commented on and used as reference for almost every geolinguistic study. However, the description of the boundary lines proposed by his study referred to localities and geographical features (especially rivers and hills) which are not present in the accompanying map, and therefore cannot be appropriately reproduced. In addition to the aforementioned dialectal division, Nascentes presented a suggestion for a 'network of points' to be used in the gathering of data for the Brazilian Linguistic Atlas (Nascentes, 1958). Like his previous document, the network of points was elaborated according to toponymic features and political divisions that, due to several changes in the Brazilian political divisions between 1953 and today, do not correspond to the country's current toponyms and political-administrative divisions. This thesis will present a map of the dialectal division as well as 26 other maps with the suggested locations (one for each unit of the current federation), elaborated with automated cartography resources, using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) database resources, associating each element of the description to as much information as needed (attributes), whether geographic, historical and socioeconomic, identifying them by their geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude), which guarantees the individual characteristics of identification for each one of them, therefore discarding any ambiguity problems. The observation of official cartography in this map will allow that, at any given time, any locality or physical accident can now be identified and get new information associated with it. This will be the biggest difference between this map and all others published so far, allowing current and future generations of linguists to benefit from it.