Language's History

Another group which had a great impact on Brazilian culture and language were the Africans; examples of words of African origin are dende for "palm oil", candomble (religion) and samba (music and dance).

The south of Brazil has received masses of immigrants in the end ofthe XIX century, mainly from Italy, Japan and Germany. These linguistic groups would quickly make contributions to the enlargement of the vocabulary and pronunciation of local varieties of Brazilian Portuguese.

Today, following a world tendency, English words are used especially in technical fields. However, the average Brazilian - as it is truth of the average American in the US - does not speak a second language. Foreign visitors, therefore, should not expect Brazilians to understand English or even Spanish, even though they may be surprised with the extent to which Brazilians enjoy to spend time socializing, in spite of the language barriers.

Check out our Useful terms and expressions in Portuguese Guide

Brazil has approximately 170 languages today. The great majority of them is spoken in indigenous reservations located in the states of Amazonas (62), Mato-Grosso (28), Pará(25), Rondonia (25) and Roraima (11). Most of these lan- guages are part of one of the five major linguistic groups of Brazil: Tupi, Macro-Ge, Karib, Aruak, and Pano.

The total number of speakers of the Brazilian Indigenous languages is appro- ximately 150,000. Whereas some languages have thousands of speakers and are being actively learned by children, many others are in precarious conditions. For example, the Xipaya (Juruna family, Tupi stock) language is now spoken by only two older women in Altamira, Pará. The last two speakers of Puruborá, the only language of the Puruborá family of the Tupi stock (listed as extinct for the last thirty years) were recently discovered, but they hadn't spoken the language for 40 years and could remember less than 200 words.

The Tupinambá (the indigenous language which mainly influenced Brazilian Portuguese, see up) is today extinct, even though elements of it survived in the "Lingua Geral Amazonica" or Nheengatu, a language which retains qualities of Portuguese and Tupinambá, having been largely spoken in Amazonia in the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. Its descendant today is called Nheengatu, which is spoken, among other regions, in the upper Rio Negro (NW Amazonia).

The great majority of the Brazilian indians are at least bilingual, since, apart from their own language, they speak Portuguese. Multilingualism can also be found in certain regions, such as the eastern Uape's river, where Tukano po- pulations, due to exogamous marriages and linguistic purism, speak in average 3 to 5 languages.

Reference: Rodrigues, Aryon, 1986. Linguas Brasileiras - Para o Conhecimento das linguas indigenas. Sao Paulo: Loyola. Some of the information above was given to me first-hand by Dr. Denny Moore from the Linguistic Division of the Museu Emi'lio Goeldi, Bele'm, PA, Brazil.

To add your website in our directory, please use this form.

return to the interest links index

Other Subjects in our Website

Portuguese, Brazilian, English, translations, software, translates, translators, translating, languages, programs, automatic, conversions, applications, tools, texts, words, phrases, sentences, documents, letters, e-mails, web sites, Internet, translated, translatable, globalization, Spanish, grammars, comments, users, conjugations, smart, Portuguese English, English Portuguese, languages, German, French, Italian, desktops, utilities, machine translations, portagee, portugee, portuese, portugese, portogese, portuguse, portugues, potugues, portugueese, potugese, portuges, portgeuse, easiest, fastest, good, accurate, flexible, sophisticated, translation software, translation programs, dictionary, translation tools, grammars, speech synthesizers, voices synthesizers, text to speech, spell-checks, spells, spellings, thesauruses, post-translation,