The study describes the urban variety of Brazilian that developed in Recife in the 19th century. It begins with a general periodization of the language history of Brazil, focussing especially on aspects such as urbanization, population migration, degree of literacy, and the relationship between oral and literary. The main body of the work is devoted to the analysis of a corpus of 'small ads' in newspapers examined specifically particularly for what they have to tell us about 'semi-orality' as a product of the pulls and tensions obtaining between oral and written language.