Documenting 17 th -century Língua de Preto: Evidence from the Coimbra archives Ana R. Luís & Paulo Estudante University of Coimbra While evidence on Língua de Preto has been drawn mostly from 16 th - and 18 th -century literary sources, very little is known about the fate of this Afro-Portuguese vernacular in the 17 th century. The goal of this study is to shed new light on the development of Lingua de Preto throughout the 17 th century. To that end, this article draws on a collection of music manuscripts stored in the historical archives of the University of Coimbra. These show that Língua de Preto enjoyed much vitality as the language of the Vilancicos de Negro, a popular music genre sung exclusively in Língua de Preto (Remédios 1923, Ribeiro 1952). In this study, we offer a preliminary survey of the linguistic properties of lyrics in Língua de Preto and compare them to those previously observed by Teyssier (1959) and Kihm & Rougé (2013), in 16 th -century Vicentine texts. Our evidence reveals that while there are similarities between 16 th and 17 th Lingua de Preto, there are also important differences: Vilancicos de Negro show the use of determiners and overt plural marking within the Noun Phrase. These are properties that are absent from 16 th -century Língua de Preto and which strongly support the development of a more elaborate Afro- Portuguese grammar. Keywords: Old Afro-Portuguese, Língua de Preto, Vilancicos de Negro, Portuguese-based creoles, plural marking, number agreement, gender agreement, Baroque church music, music manuscripts 1. Introduction * Língua de Preto is the literary representation of the Afro-Portuguese vernacular made popular by 16 th century Portuguese playwrights (in particular Gil Vicente, 1465-1536). Several of the linguistic features of 16 th -century Língua de Preto are consistent with the grammar of West- African Portuguese-based creoles and partially restructured varieties of Portuguese, which explains why Vicentine texts have received much attention from contact linguistics, as credible sources of evidence on Old Afro-Portuguese and creole formation (Lipski 2009, Holm 2013, Kihm & Rougé 2013). Intriguingly, however, while Gil Vicente and his followers left us abundant 16 th - century sources, very little documentary evidence has surfaced for 17 th -century Língua de Preto. Scholars’ general assessment is that Língua de Preto originated as a 16 th -century phenomenon that vanished during the 17 th century from Portuguese textual sources. This is, for instance, the view expressed by Teyssier (2005) in his revised (i.e., updated and extended) edition of A Língua de Gil Vicente: * We would like to thank Armin Schwegler, John McWhorter and Miguel Gutiérrez Mate for insightful comments on our manuscript. We are grateful to Armin and Liane Ströbel for organizing the workshop at the University of Münster and to the workshop participants for their helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to the audience of the Annual Meeting of the Associação de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola, in Lisbon, June 2013, where parts of this paper were presented, and to Alain Kihm for sharing his enthusiasm on Lingua de Preto with us.