ABSTRACT
Variationist Sociolinguistics has shown to be a fertile approach for the understanding of linguistic variation and change in many different speech communities. The main goal of this chapter is to show that it has been successful in studies of European and Brazilian Portuguese. We outline dialectological and variation studies of both varieties that have allowed us to draw up a reliable portrait of these varieties. We focus on the variation between the second person pronouns tu ‘you’ and você ‘you’. We argue that the spread of the form você in Brazilian and European Portuguese correlate to social differences between the varieties.
