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[^0]:    4 Maria Carlota Rosa (2013) presents the facsimile of Pedro Dias' Arte and carefully analyses the work within the context in which it was written.  
do Carmo-Sabará-Rio dos Montes, of 100,000 slaves - regularly renewed over a period of 40-50 years - originating from the coast of Benin (referred to as Mina and located roughly between Ghana and Nigeria). This situation gave rise to a vehicular variety typologically close to the African languages of this same coast. The languages currently spoken in the region of origin of the slaves are classified in the Gbe subgroup, the Kwa group of the Niger-Congo family. There are some 50 tongues in this subgroup, of which the best known are Eve, Fon, Gen, Aja, Gun and Mahi, which may have been present in the mining region at the time the Lingua Geral was recorded.  
This emergence of an African vehicular language can be explained by economy of communication and the need to overcome the disintegration of the various languages that were typologically very close to the African language spoken in the mines, in the eighteenth century. This text, only published in 1945, in Lisbon, is the most 'precious' document on African languages in Brazil, since it bears witness to the existence of an African vehicular language designated a Lingua Geral (General Language), probably in reference to the general language of the Indigenous population (Bonvini and Taddoni Petter, 1998, pp. 75-76).  
Antonio da Costa Peixoto's manuscript, written with the intention of facilitating the slaveholders' learning of the language used in the mines, also reveals a change in the African linguistic landscape in Brazil: in the eighteenth century, the languages of the Benin coast were in evidence, at least in the most economically active regions (bearing in mind the lack of documentation on the rest of the country).