História social-linguística da Capitania de Ilhéus: o século XVI // Social-linguistic history of the Ilheus Captaincy: the 16th century

This article presents a historical retrospective of the Ilheus Captaincy from its foundation in 1534 until 1593. We have used the
Thomas Ferreira Process, a manuscript found in the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon, Portugal, to penetrate the intricacies of that region’s social-linguistic dynamics in this period of Brazilian history. Based on Thomas Ferreira Process, we confirmed hypotheses already raised elsewhere (e.g., Rodrigues 2006, Cancela 2012) that Tupinambá was the supra-ethnic language of Brazil’s early colonization, at least regarding the Ilheus Captaincy. At the same time, we can launch new hypotheses about what would have been the linguistic configuration (monolingualism and bilingualism situation) of that captaincy in the sixteenth century. Moreover, we aim to investigate the communication environment in which these linguistic configurations have manifested,
namely, the environments [i] outside sugarcane mills, [ii] inside the mills, and [iii] some trade patterns from the colonial capital to the
Metropolis.