Language
As in all Brazil, Portuguese is the main spoken language. A few expressions of Spanish origin are common (such as "gracias" instead of "obrigado", or the expletive "tchê") etc., due to the proximity with Argentina and Uruguay and their common Gaucho past. Also a few words of German origin, particularly referring to culinary, have entered the vocabulary, such as "chimia" (from "schmier") and "cuca" (from "kuecher"). Words of Indian Guarani language origin also make up the vocabulary. Example is the largely used word "guri", meaning "boy".
The gaúchos are also famous by their use of the pronoun "tu", instead of "você". In the traditional gaúcho dialect of the Pampas, the verb is conjugated correctly in the second person singular, just like the European Portuguese (tu cantas, tu bates, tu partes, tu pões). In the colloquial Portuguese of Porto Alegre, however, the verb is conjugated in the second person as in the third person (tu canta, tu bate, tu parte, tu põe).
Read more about this topic: Rio Grande Do Sul
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)