Languages of Brazil
Portuguese is the official and national language of Brazil, being widely spoken by nearly all of its population. Brazil is the most populous Portuguese-speaking country in the world, with its lands comprising the majority of Portugal's former colonial holdings in the Americas.
Aside from Portuguese, the country also has numerous minority languages, including over 200 different indigenous languages, such as Nheengatu, and languages of more recent European and Asian immigrants, such as Italian, German and Japanese. In some municipalities, those minor languages have official status: Nheengatu, for example, is an official language in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, while a number of German dialects are official in nine southern municipalities.
Hunsrik is a Germanic language also spoken in Argentina, Paraguay and Venezuela, which derived from the Hunsrückisch dialect. Hunsrik has official status in Antônio Carlos and Santa Maria do Herval, and is recognized by the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina as part of their historical and cultural heritage.
As of 2023, the population of Brazil speaks or signs 238 languages, of which approximately 217 are indigenous and others are non-indigenous. In 2005, no indigenous language was spoken by more than 40,000 people.
With the implementation of the Orthographic Agreement of 1990, the orthographic norms of Brazil and Portugal have been largely unified, but still have some minor differences. Brazil enacted these changes in 2009 and Portugal enacted them in 2012.
In 2002, the Brazilian Sign Language was made the official language of the Brazilian deaf community.
On December 9, 2010, the National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity was created, which will analyze proposals for revitalizing minority languages in the country. In 2019, the Technical Commission of the National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity was established.
Overview
Before the first Portuguese explorers arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by several Amerindian peoples that spoke many different languages. According to Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues there were six million Indians in Brazil speaking over 1,000 different languages. When the Portuguese settlers arrived, they encountered the Tupi people, who dominated most of the Brazilian coast and spoke a set of closely related languages.The Tupi called the non-Tupi peoples "Tapuias", a designation that the Portuguese adopted; however, there was little unity among the diverse Tapuia tribes other than their not being Tupi. In the first two centuries of colonization, a language based on Tupian languages known as Língua Geral was widely spoken in the colony, not only by the Amerindians, but also by the Portuguese settlers, the Africans and their descendants.
This language was spoken in a vast area from São Paulo to Maranhão, as an informal language for domestic use, while Portuguese was the language used for public purposes. Língua Geral was spread by the Jesuit missionaries and Bandeirantes to other areas of Brazil where the Tupi language was not spoken. In 1775, the Marquis of Pombal prohibited the use of Língua Geral or any other indigenous languagean areas where the Tupi people were not present.
However, before that prohibition, the Portuguese language was dominant in Brazil. Most of the other Amerindian languages gradually disappeared as the populations that spoke them were integrated or decimated when the Portuguese-speaking population expanded to most of Brazil. The several African languages spoken in Brazil also disappeared. Since the 20th century there are no more records of speakers of African languages in the country. However, in some isolated communities settled by escaped slaves, the Portuguese language spoken by its inhabitants still preserves some lexicon of African origin, which is not understood by other Brazilians.
File:Museu da Língua Portuguesa.jpg|thumb|right|Inside the Museum of the Portuguese Language in São Paulo.
Due to the contact with several European, Amerindian and African languages, the Portuguese spoken in Brazil absorbed many influences from these languages, which led to a notable differentiation from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal. Examples of widely used words of Tupi origin in Brazilian Portuguese include abacaxi, pipoca, catapora, and siri. The names of thirteen of Brazil's twenty six states also have Amerindian origin.
Starting in the early 19th century, Brazil started to receive substantial immigration of non-Portuguese-speaking people from Europe and Asia. Most immigrants, particularly Italians and Spaniards, adopted the Portuguese language after a few generations. Other immigrants, particularly Germans, Japanese, Poles and Ukrainians, preserved their languages for more generations. German-speaking immigrants started arriving in 1824. They came not only from Germany, but also from other countries that had a substantial German-speaking population.
During over 100 years of continuous emigration, it is estimated that some 300,000 German-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil. Italian immigration started in 1875 and about 1.5 million Italians immigrated to Brazil until World War II. They spoke several dialects from Italy. Other sources of immigration to Brazil included Spaniards, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese and Middle-easterns. With the notable exception of the Germans, who preserved their language for several generations, and in some degree the Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Arabs, Kurds and Italians, most of the immigrants in Brazil adopted Portuguese as their mother tongue after a few generations.
Brazilian Portuguese
is the official language of Brazil and the primary language used in most schools and media. It is also used for all business and administrative purposes. Brazilian Portuguese has had its own development, influenced by the other European languages such as Italian and German in the South and Southeast, and several indigenous languages all across the country.For this reason, Brazilian Portuguese differs noticeably from European Portuguese and other dialects of Portuguese-speaking countries, even though they are all mutually intelligible. Such differences occur in phonetics and lexicon and have been compared to the differences between British English and American English.
Brazilian Sign Language
The Brazilian Sign Language is the sign language used by deaf people in Brazilian urban centers and legally recognized as a means of communication and expression. It is derived both from an autochthonous sign language, which is native to the region or territory in which it lives, and from French sign language; therefore, it is similar to other European and American sign languages. Libras is not the simple sign language of the Portuguese language, but a separate language, as evidenced by the fact that in Portugal a different sign language is used, Portuguese Sign Language.Like the various existing natural and human languages, it is composed of linguistic levels such as: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Just as in oral-auditory languages there are words, in sign languages there are also lexical items, which are called signs. The difference is its modality of articulation, namely visual-spatial, or kinesic-visual, for others. Therefore, to communicate in Libras, it is not enough just to know signs. It is necessary to know your grammar to combine sentences, establishing communication correctly, avoiding the use of "signaled Portuguese".
Signals arise from the combination of hand configurations, movements, and points of articulation — places in space or on the body where signals are made — and also from facial and body expressions that convey the feelings that are conveyed to listeners by voice intonation, which together make up the basic units of this language. Thus, Libras presents itself as a linguistic system for the transmission of ideas and facts, coming from communities of deaf people in Brazil. As with any language, there are also regional differences in Libras. Therefore, attention should be paid to its variations in each federative unit of Brazil.
In addition to being recognized nationally since 2002, Libras has also been made official at the municipal level in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Ouro Preto and Salvador. In Rio de Janeiro, the teaching of Libras was made official in the curriculum of the municipal school system.
April 24 was made official as the National Day of Brazilian Sign Language.
Minority languages
Despite the fact that Portuguese is the official language of Brazil and the vast majority of Brazilians speak only Portuguese, there are several other languages spoken in the country. According to the president of IBGE there are an estimated 210 languages spoken in Brazil. 154 are Amerindian languages, while the others are languages brought by immigrants.The 1950 census was the last one to ask Brazilians which language they speak at home. Since then, the census does not ask about language. However, the census of 2010 asked respondents which languages they speak, allowing a better analysis of the languages spoken in Brazil.
The first municipality to co-officialize other languages alongside Portuguese was São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the state of Amazonas, with the languages Nheengatu, Tukano and Baniwa. Since then, other Brazilian municipalities have co-officialized other languages.
Immigrant languages
European immigrant languages
According to the 1940 census, after Portuguese, German was the most widely spoken language in Brazil. Although the Italian immigration to Brazil was much more significant than the German one, the German language had many more speakers than the Italian one, according to the census. The census revealed that two-thirds of the children of German immigrants spoke German at home. In comparison, half of the children of Italians spoke Portuguese at home. The stronger preservation of the German language when compared to the Italian one has many factors: Italian is closer to Portuguese than German, leading to a faster assimilation of the Italian speakers. Also, the German immigrants used to educate their children in German schools. The Italians, on the other hand, had less organized ethnic schools and the cultural formation was centered in church, not in schools. Most of the children of Italians went to public schools, where Portuguese was spoken. Until World War II, some 1.5 million Italians had immigrated to Brazil, compared to only 250,000 Germans. However, the 1940 census revealed that German was spoken as a home language by 644,458 people, compared to only 458,054 speakers of Italian.Spaniards, who formed the third largest immigrant group in Brazil were also quickly assimilated into the Portuguese-speaking majority. Spanish is similar to Portuguese, which led to a fast assimilation. Moreover, many of the Spanish immigrants were from Galicia, where they also speak Galician, which is closer to Portuguese, sometimes even being considered two dialects of the same language. Despite the large influx of Spanish immigrants to Brazil from 1880 to 1930 the census of 1940 revealed that only 74,000 people spoke Spanish in Brazil.
Other languages such as Polish and Ukrainian, along with German and Italian, are spoken in rural areas of Southern Brazil, by small communities of descendants of immigrants, who are for the most part bilingual. There are whole regions in southern Brazil where people speak both Portuguese and one or more of these languages. For example, it is reported that more than 90% of the residents of the small city of Presidente Lucena, located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, speak Hunsrik, a language derived from the Hunsrückisch dialect of German. Hunsrik, or Riograndenser Hunsrückisch, has around 3,000,000 native speakers in Brazil, while also having some speakers in Argentina, Paraguay and Venezuela. The language is most used in the countryside of the South Region states of Brazil, with a considerable amount of native speakers using it as their main or even only language.
File:Região da Liberdade - São Paulo - Brasil.JPG|right|thumb|Liberdade, São Paulo, has the largest concentration of ethnic Japanese outside Japan.
Some immigrant communities in southern Brazil, chiefly the German and the Italian ones, have lasted long enough to develop distinctive dialects from their original European sources. For example, Brazilian German, a broad category which includes the Hunsrik language, but also East Pomerian and Plautdietsch dialects. In the Serra Gaúcha region, we can find Italian dialects such as Talian or italiano riograndense, based on the Venetian language.
Other German dialects were transplanted to this part of Brazil. For example, the Austrian dialect spoken in Dreizehnlinden or Treze Tílias in the state of Santa Catarina; or the dialect Schwowisch, from Donauschwaben immigrants, is spoken in Entre Rios, Guarapuava, in the state of Paraná; or the East Pomeranian dialect spoken in many different parts of southern Brazil.
Plautdietsch is spoken by the descendants of Russian Mennonites. However, these languages have been rapidly replaced by Portuguese in the last few decades, partly due to a government decision to integrate immigrant populations. Today, states like Rio Grande do Sul are trying to reverse that trend and immigrant languages such as German and Italian are being reintroduced into the curriculum again, in communities where they originally thrived. Meanwhile, on the Argentinian and Uruguayan border regions, Brazilian students are being introduced to the Spanish language.