Portuguese Language Museum in São Paulo There are a number of other languages spoken in Brazil, although even collectively they account for only a very small minority of the population. According to the 1940 Census, the most popular second language (after Portuguese) at the time was German. Although the percentage of Italian immigration to Brazil was much more significant than that of the Germans, the German language had many more speakers than the Italian one, according to that Census. The main reason for this was that two-thirds of the children of German immigrants spoke German at home, while half of the children of Italians spoke Portuguese at home. This illustrates the fact that the new Italian immigrants had a much easier time assimilating to the Portuguese language.

Today there are still pockets in Brazil where the German and Italian languages can still be heard. However, these languages are rarely taught in the nation’s schools. Most second-language learners now focus on Spanish and English, two of the most widespread languages in the world. Visit www.domyassignment.com to be assisted with your language assignments.

In the large city of São Paulo, Brazil, the native languages of the Korean, Chinese and Japanese people are fairly common in the immigrant districts. A Japanese-language newspaper, the São Paulo Shinbun, has been published in the city of São Paulo since 1946. In addition to São Paulo, there is also a significant community of Japanese speakers in the cities of Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará and Amazonas. Much smaller groups exist in Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul and other parts of Brazil. Many Chinese, especially from Macau, speak a Chinese creole called Macanese (patuá or macaísta), aside from Mandarin and Cantonese.

Along with the immigrant languages that can occasionally be heard in certain sections of Brazil, dozens of discrete indigenous languages also remain. As mentioned briefly above, the Tupian, or Tupí-Guaraní, language group has especially influenced Brazilian place-names and added perhaps thousands of words and expressions to Brazilian Portuguese. Tupian was the principal language of Brazil’s native peoples before European contact, and it became the lingua franca between Indians and Portuguese traders, missionaries, adventurers, and administrators; it was widely used in the Amazon region and western Brazil until the 19th century. The Tupian influence also caused Brazilians to enunciate more clearly and to use more nasal speech patterns than their Iberian counterparts.

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