Brazil is the most populous Portuguese-speaking country in the world, with its lands comprising the majority of Portugal's former colonial holdings in the Americas.

[13] On December 9, 2010, the National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity was created,[14] which will analyze proposals for revitalizing minority languages in the country.

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.

Língua Geral was spread by the Jesuit missionaries and Bandeirantes to other areas of Brazil where the Tupi language was not spoken.

However, as late as the 1940s, Língua Geral was widely spoken in some Northern Amazonian areas where the Tupi people were not present.

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.

[23] Examples of widely used words of Tupi origin in Brazilian Portuguese include abacaxi ("pineapple"), pipoca ("popcorn"), catapora ("chickenpox"), and siri ("crab").

They came not only from Germany, but also from other countries that had a substantial German-speaking population (Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Romania and Russia (Volga Germans).

Like the various existing natural and human languages, it is composed of linguistic levels such as: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

[32] Thus, Libras presents itself as a linguistic system for the transmission of ideas and facts, coming from communities of deaf people in Brazil.

In addition to being recognized nationally since 2002,[33][34] Libras has also been made official at the municipal level in Belo Horizonte,[35][36] Curitiba,[37][38] Ouro Preto[39][40][41][42] and Salvador.

[55] Spaniards, who formed the third largest immigrant group in Brazil (after the Portuguese and Italians) were also quickly assimilated into the Portuguese-speaking majority.

Other languages such as Polish and Ukrainian, along with German and Italian, are spoken in rural areas of Southern Brazil, by small communities of descendants of immigrants, who are for the most part bilingual.

For example, it is reported that more than 90% of the residents of the small city of Presidente Lucena, located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, speak Hunsrik, a language[6] derived from the Hunsrückisch dialect of German.

[6] Some immigrant communities in southern Brazil, chiefly the German and the Italian ones, have lasted long enough to develop distinctive dialects from their original European sources.

For example, Brazilian German, a broad category which includes the Hunsrik language, but also East Pomerian and Plautdietsch dialects.

In the Serra Gaúcha region, we can find Italian dialects such as Talian or italiano riograndense, based on the Venetian language.

For example, the Austrian dialect spoken in Dreizehnlinden or Treze Tílias in the state of Santa Catarina; or the dialect Schwowisch (Standard German: Schwäbisch), from Donauschwaben immigrants, is spoken in Entre Rios, Guarapuava, in the state of Paraná; or the East Pomeranian dialect spoken in many different parts of southern Brazil (in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Espírito Santo, São Paulo, etc.).

However, these languages have been rapidly replaced by Portuguese in the last few decades, partly due to a government decision to integrate immigrant populations.

Today, states like Rio Grande do Sul are trying to reverse that trend and immigrant languages such as German and Italian are being reintroduced into the curriculum again, in communities where they originally thrived.

[61][62] There is a significant community of Japanese speakers in São Paulo, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará and Amazonas.

Some Chinese, especially from Macau, speak a Portuguese-based creole language called Macanese (patuá or macaísta), aside from Hakka, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Today, Brazil is home to the world's largest community of Japanese descendants outside of Japan, numbering about 1.5 million people.

In the state of Paraná, there are several communities of Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavics that live in rural areas and in some municipalities such as Curitiba, Irati, Guarapuava, Ponta Grossa and Prudentópolis.

In the city of Foz do Iguaçu (on the border with Paraguay and Argentina), there are many Arabic speakers, these people are mainly immigrants from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

[73] The 21st century has seen the growth of a trend of co-official languages in cities populated by immigrants (such as Italian and German) or indigenous in the north, both with support from the Ministry of Tourism, as was recently established in Santa Maria de Jetibá, Pomerode and Vila Pavão,[74] where East Pomeranian also has co-official status.

Also in production is the documentary video Brasil Talian,[78] with directed and written by André Costantin and executive producer of the historian Fernando Roveda.

489 was drafted, authored by Chico d'Ângelo, which provides linguistic rights for Brazilians, especially communities that use minority languages as their mother tongue.

[93] In 2021, Governor Ratinho Júnior sanctioned state law 20,757, which makes the municipality of Colombo the capital of Talian in Paraná.