This work deals with a presentation of Norte Vogais project's actions linked to the PROBRAVO team. This paper gives a clear idea of how the UFPA team has been conducting its research about Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Amazon. The Norte Vogais project database has samples of 318 native speakers from Pará. The sociolinguistic descriptions prioritized the research of three phonetic aspects: a) unstressed mid vowels variation in pretonic position; b) unstressed mid vowels variation in post-tonic position and; c) allophonic nasalization. The results reinforce Silva Neto's hypothesis (1957) that Pará is a dialectal island in Antenor Nascente's classification in relation to North dialects. In order to precise the sociolinguistic descriptions, two new actions were necessary: a) sociolinguistic situation map of inter dialectal contact areas in Pará and; b) acoustic analysis of the vowel system of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the Amazon region of Pará.
Linguistic variation; Unstressed vowels; Brazilian Portuguese; North of Brazil
