Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.
Two corrections:
[Info dump that sounds like an “ackshyually”, but doesn’t contradict what you said, nor tries to. It’s just that you touched a topic that I enjoy talking about.]
Under the territory controlled by the Brazilian most people do speak Portuguese but there are ~200 other languages; for example a good chunk of my family speaks a Venetian variety. Spanish is among those, and it’s actually spoken by a few people born in the territory controlled by Brazil due to border changes. Other varieties besides PT and ES can be roughly split into colonial (e.g. Talian, Hunsrik, Pommersch, Polish) and Amerindian (e.g. Mbyá, Kaingang, Laklãnõ).
On the other hand, Portuguese sometimes pops up even in territory controlled by other governments than Brazil. Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) are an example, but as well some northern chunk of Uruguay. And then there’s a bunch of “portuñol” mixed varieties that IMO should be protected by the statal governments (because the federation certainly won’t).
As in, the Italo-Western Romance language? That’s fascinating! When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages. What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?
See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.
Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There’s also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).
Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called “Talian”, and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.
There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn’t be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.
Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).
That said the “bulk” of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.
Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a “belt” between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.
Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.
There’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I’m one of the mods there.]
That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, being !anime@lemmy.ml. (I wasn’t a mod there but I’m a weeb so…)
Now thinking, if I didn’t do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.