Language

Portuguese is the only official language of Brazil. It is spoken by nearly the entire population and is virtually the only language used in schools, newspapers, radio, TV and for all business and administrative purposes. Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas, making the language an important part of Brazilian national identity.

Portuguese as spoken in Brazil has developed independently of the European mother tongue, and it has undergone fewer phonetic changes than the language spoken in Portugal. It is often said that the 'language of Camões', who lived in the sixteenth century, sounded closer to modern Brazilian Portuguese, than to the language spoken in Portugal today, and that his work is poetically more perfect when read the Brazilian way.

Brazilian Portuguese has notable influences from Amerindian and African languages and several Italian assimilations. Generally, native speakers of each variant can understand one another, but there are several significant phonological, lexical and orthographic differences.

Minority Languages

Many Amerindian languages are spoken daily in indigenous communities, primarily in Northern Brazil. Although many of these communities have significant contact with Portuguese, today there are incentives for teaching and preserving native languages. In 2006, the City of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira in the region of Cabeça do Cachorro (Northwestern region of the State of Amazonas), has adopted some indigenous languages as some of its other official languages along with Portuguese.

Other languages are spoken by descendants of immigrants, who are usually bilingual, in small rural communities in Southern Brazil. The most important are the Brazilian German dialects, such as Riograndenser Hunsrückisch and the Pomeranian language, and also the Talian, based on the Italian Venetian language. In the city of São Paulo, Japanese can be heard in the immigrant neighbourhoods, such as Liberdade.

English is part of the official high school curriculum, but few Brazilians are truly fluent in the language, even in Brazilian universities. The Brazilian government has chosen to concentrate on teaching Spanish in public schools rather than English. Spanish is understood to varying degrees by many Brazilians, especially on the borders with Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.