Sorry-not-sorry for the clickbaity title, but it’s true. Brazil is a Portuguese-speaking country, but being in Latin America it would make sense for the second most spoken language to be Spanish, right? Well, it is not.1
— Is it English then?
Nope. Very few people actually even understand English, which is barely used in their daily lives.
— Maybe some indigenous language then?
Despite a mix of Tupi (an indigenous language) and Portuguese being the most spoken language for a while in the territory of what’s currently Brazil2, the Portuguese Empire forbade the people from speaking it after a while, so it’s wrong again (and it speaks volumes about how the indigenous population was destroyed and their culture, erased).
— Some African language then? There were a lot of slaves being taken from Africa to Brazil.
Brazilian Portuguese assimilated a lot of words from African languages… but nope. I mean, do you think slave owners would allow them to keep their culture intact?
— Brazil was a hotspot for Italian immigration, so maybe it’s Italian?
Well… no, although a lot of people do speak some regional variations of Italian.
— Ok, which is the second most spoken language in Brazil then?
If you remove the Brazilian sign language from the equation3, it’s German. More specifically, Hunsrik, a German dialect that seems to be dying in Germany, but apparently still thrives in Brazil with millions of speakers.
It’s possible to derive tons of opinions regarding Brazilian history out of this, many of which would be valid and correct, but it’s such a random thing that it always takes people by surprise, including Brazilians themselves, because this language is spoken only in a specific region of the country. I myself only found out about it a few years ago.
Anyway, Brazil is a diverse and multicultural country, so it’s worth checking the Wikipedia page about languages spoken in Brazil because it does a great job overall of explaining the subject and showing the linguistic variety of the country.
-
Which I think is silly, as it would greatly benefit Brazil in general, but I digress. ↩
-
The General Language ↩
-
Which is widely used for a specific and very valid reason, so it would be kinda of cheating to consider it. ↩
My guess was Japanese since I knew Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. Nice to get a reminder of my own small reference pools.
Funny enough, I think that could’ve been true during the early-to-mid 20th century, before the Japanese migrants completely urbanized and the second/third generation started using only Portuguese outside of their home.