Languages in Brazil
Brazil is an extremely large country with a very diverse population. Many different ethnicities, religions, and cultures are represented in the population. Likewise, many different languages are spoken. While Portuguese is the country’s official and dominant language, indigenous, European, and Asian languages are also spoken.
Virtually all of the Brazilian population speaks Portuguese, if only out of necessity. Portuguese is nearly the only language used in schools, newspapers, radio, and television. It is also the language used for all business and administrative purposes. Brazil is culturally distanced from its Spanish-speaking neighbors as it is the only nation in the Americas that speaks Portuguese. In daily life, however, other minority languages are uses in different regions of Brazil’s vast territory. Indigenous people have maintained some of their native dialects. Foreign immigrants and their descendants have also maintained their native language in many cases.
It should also be noted that Brazilian Portuguese is different from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal and other nations. This is mainly due to the fact that Brazilian Portuguese has been strongly influenced by both Amerindian and African dialects. There are hundreds of words in the Brazilian Portuguese dictionary today that have their origins in one of these dialects.
There are many indigenous groups, centered mainly in Northern Brazil, and they have retained their native dialects. The primary indigenous languages in existence today are Apalai, Bororo, Canellla, Arara, Caribe, Caraja, Guarani, Nadeb, Kaingang, Terena, Nheengatu, Tupinquim, and Tucano. There are two Brazilian “general languages”, one of which is Nheengatu. Until the late 1800s is was a common language and used by many indigenous, European, African, and mixed-race peoples all along Brazil’s coast. It was actually spoken by a majority of the land’s population. Today, it is an official language in the city of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira and in the Amazon Basin it is used to print political campaigning.
In rural languages of Southern Brazil, there are small communities of the descendants of Europeans immigrants who have become largely bilingual. They speak both Portuguese and the language of their family, such as German, Italian, Polish and Ukranian. In one small city located in Rio Grande do Sul, over ninety percent of the population speak Riograndenser Hunsruckisch, which is a Brazilian form of the Hunsruckisch German dialect.
There also many districts where there are significant Korean, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants who have also retained their native languages. A Japanese newspaper called Sao Paulo Shinbun has been published in Sao Paulo since 1946. Many of the Chinese-Brazilians also speak a Portuguese Creole called Macanese.
English is an official part of high school curriculum in Brazil but there is a very small portion of the population that have a working and fluent knowledge of the language. Bilingual programs are beginning to become more widely embraced in Brazil due both to the diversity of languages in existence and the realization that it is easily possible for one to learn and master more than one language in a lifetime.