The German-based varieties spoken by German Brazilians together form a significant minority language in Brazil.

"Brazilian German" is strongly influenced by Portuguese and to a lesser extent by Italian dialects as well as indigenous languages.

Today, (Low-) German is increasingly cultivated as a cultural heritage, and several municipalities have recently given co-official status with Portuguese to one Brazilian variant or another of it.

The elementary school of Santa Maria do Herval, a municipality in Rio Grande do Sul with a population of roughly 6,000, teaches Hunsrik and uses a new orthography for this which is closer to Portuguese than to Standard German conventions, this follows a research by SIL International and led by professor Ursula Wiesemann to standardize the language according to its actual use in the local communities and social networks.

A concurrent standardization approach led by the professor Cléo Altenhofen criticizes this detachment, demanding a closer orthographic tie between Hunsrik and Standard German, and arguing that the efforts should try to revert the Portuguese influence over the language by keeping a very conservative orthography, in a way that it would be only a variation of the original Hunsrückisch dialect.