Languages of Brazil - Overview

Overview

Before the first Portuguese arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by several Amerindian peoples, who spoke different languages. According to Rodrigues, there were six million Indians in Brazil speaking 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, 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. Then, until the 1940s this language based on Tupi was widely spoken in some Northern Amazonian areas where the Tupi people were not present. In 1775, Marquês de Pombal prohibited the use of Língua geral or any other indigenous language in Brazil.

However, before that prohibition, the Portuguese language was dominant in Brazil. Most of the several 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 (Quilombo) the Portuguese language spoken by its inhabitants still preserves some lexicon of African origin, which is not understood by other Brazilians. Due to the contact with several 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.

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 and Japanese, preserved their languages and took more generations to adopt Portuguese as their mother tongue. 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 (Switzerland, Poland, Austria and Russia (Volga Germans). 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 and Italians, most of the immigrants in Brazil adopted Portuguese as their mother tongue after a few generations.

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