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Portuguese is the official language〔According to the Brazilian Constitution: "Art. 13. A língua portuguesa é o idioma oficial da República Federativa do Brasil."()〕 of Brazil, and is spoken by more than 99% of the population. Minority languages include indigenous languages, and languages of more recent European and Asian immigrants. The population speaks or signs approximately 210 languages, of which 180 are indigenous.〔(Ethnologue )〕 Less than forty thousand people actually speak any one of the indigenous languages in the Brazilian territory . Until today, German is the second most spoken first language or second mother tongue in the country.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Brazil )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Hunsrik )〕 Language is one of the strongest elements of Brazil's national unity. The only non-Portuguese speakers are members of Amerindian groups, and pockets of immigrants who maintain their heritage languages. Within Brazil, there is no major dialect variation of the Portuguese, but only moderate regional variation in accent, vocabulary, and use of personal nouns, pronouns, and verb conjugations. Variations are diminishing as a result of mass media, especially national television networks that are viewed by the majority of Brazilians. The written language, which is uniform across Brazil, follows national rules of spelling and accentuation that are revised from time to time for simplification. With the implementation of the 1990 agreement spelling, the orthographic norms of Brazil and Portugal will become identical, with some minor differences, which are equally valid in both countries. Written Brazilian Portuguese differs significantly from the spoken language, with only an educated subsection of the population adhering to prescriptive norms. Written Brazilian Portuguese differs significantly from the spoken language. The rules of grammar are complex and allow more flexibility than English or Spanish. Many foreigners who speak Portuguese fluently have difficulty writing it properly. Because of Brazil's size, self-sufficiency, and relative isolation, foreign languages are not widely spoken. English is often studied in school and increasingly in private courses. It has replaced French as the principal second language among educated people. Spanish is mutually intelligible with Portuguese to a certain degree, allowing Brazilians to considerably understand written and spoken Spanish without prior study, but finding difficulty in oral communication, while Spanish speakers usually have difficulty understanding spoken Portuguese.〔(Portuguese language in Brazil and other languages )〕 In 2002, Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) was made the official language of the Brazilian deaf community. ==Overview== Before the first Portuguese arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by several Amerindian peoples, who spoke different languages. According to Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues there were six million Indians in Brazil speaking 1,000 different languages. When the Portuguese settlers arrived, they encountered the Tupi people, who dominated most of the Brazilian coast and spoke a set of closely related languages. The Tupi called the non-Tupi peoples "Tapuias", a designation that the Portuguese adopted; however, there was little unity among the diverse Tapuia tribes other than their not being Tupi. In the first two centuries of colonization, a language based on Tupian languages (known as Língua geral) was widely spoken in the colony, not only by the Amerindians, but also by the Portuguese settlers, Africans and their descendants. This language was spoken in a vast area from São Paulo to Maranhão, as an informal language for domestic use, while Portuguese was the language used for public purposes. Língua Geral was spread by the Jesuit missionaries and Bandeirantes to other areas of Brazil where the Tupi language was not spoken. Then, until the 1940s this language based on Tupi was widely spoken in some Northern Amazonian areas where the Tupi people were not present. In 1775, Marquês de Pombal prohibited the use of Língua geral or any other indigenous language in Brazil. However, before that prohibition, the Portuguese language was dominant in Brazil. Most of the several other Amerindian languages gradually disappeared as the populations that spoke them were integrated or decimated when the Portuguese-speaking population expanded to most of Brazil. The several African languages spoken in Brazil also disappeared. Since the 20th century there are no more records of speakers of African languages in the country. However, in some isolated communities settled by escaped slaves (Quilombo) the Portuguese language spoken by its inhabitants still preserves some lexicon of African origin, which is not understood by other Brazilians.〔(Línguas Africanas )〕 Due to the contact with several Amerindian and African languages, the Portuguese spoken in Brazil absorbed many influences from these languages, which led to a notable differentiation from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal.〔(Línguas indígenas )〕 Starting in the early 19th century, Brazil started to receive substantial immigration of non-Portuguese-speaking people from Europe and Asia. Most immigrants, particularly Italians〔 and Spaniards, adopted the Portuguese language after a few generations. Other immigrants, particularly Germans, Japanese and Ukrainians,〔〔 preserved their languages and took more generations to adopt Portuguese as their mother tongue. German-speaking〔"German" here meaning varied germanic dialects spoken in Germany and other countries, not standard German.〕 immigrants started arriving in 1824. They came not only from Germany, but also from other countries that had a substantial German-speaking population (Switzerland, Poland, Austria and Russia (Volga Germans). During over 100 years of continuous emigration, it is estimated that some 300,000 German-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil. Italian immigration started in 1875 and about 1.5 million Italians immigrated to Brazil until World War II. They spoke several dialects from Italy. Other sources of immigration to Brazil included Spaniards, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese and Middle-easterns. With the notable exception of the Germans, who preserved their language for several generations, and in some degree the Japanese and Italians, most of the immigrants in Brazil adopted Portuguese as their mother tongue after a few generations.〔(Línguas europeias )〕〔(Políticas lingüísticas e a conservação da língua alemã no Brasil )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Languages of Brazil」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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