German As A Minority Language - Latin America

Latin America

At least one million German speakers live in Latin America. There are German speaking minorities in almost every Latin American country, including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In the eighteenth century only isolated or small groups of German emigrants left for Latin America. However this pattern was reversed at the start of the last century as a tidal wave of German emigration began. German emigration to the Americas totalled 200,000 people during the eighteenth century. During the 1880s, during the wave of mass emigration, this figure was reached annually. The Handbuch des Deutschtums im Ausland (The Germans Abroad Handbook) from 1906 puts a figure of 11 million people in North and South America with a knowledge of the German language, of which 9 million were in the USA. Although the USA was the focal point for emigration in the 19th century, emigration to Latin America was also significant for differing economic and political reasons.

90% of German Latin American emigrants in the 19th century went to the three Cono Sur countries: Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. In the last third of the century emigration to Argentina increased after the "Heydtschen Reskript" (1859) made emigration to Brazil harder. In the 1880s and 1890s German emigration to Latin America grew and in some years was the destination of up to 30% of German emigrants. During the Nazi period - until the ban on emigration came into effect in 1941 - some 100,000 Jews from Central Europe, the vast majority of which were German speaking, moved to South America with 90% of these moving to the Cono Sur. From the start of the 20th century until 1946 80% of Jews lived in Europe but by the end of World War II this was reduced to 25%, however after the war over 50% of Jews now lived in the Americas. This change was aided by Jewish emigration groups such as the Hilfsverein deutschsprechender Juden (later to become Asociación Filantrópica Israelita) which was based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The majority of German minorities in Latin America - as well as elsewhere around the world - experienced a decline in the use of the German language. The main cause of this decrease is the integration of communities, often originally sheltered, into the dominant society, and then modernisation after assimilation into society which confronts all immigrant groups.

Specific reasons for language change from German to the national language usually derive from the desire of many Germans to belong to their new communities after the end of World War II. This is a common feature amongst the German minorities in Latin America and those in Central and Eastern Europe: the majority of countries where German minorities lived had fought against the Germans during the war. With this change in situation the members of the German minorities, previously communities of status and prestige, were turned into undesirable minorities (though there were widespread elements of sympathy for Germany in many South American countries as well).

For many German minorities WWII thus represented the breaking point in the development of their language. In some South American countries the war period and immediately afterwards was a time of massive assimilation to the local culture (for example during the Getúlio Vargas period in Brazil).