German Brazilians
German Brazilians (German: Deutschbrasilianer, Hunsrik: Deitschbrasiliooner, Portuguese: teuto-brasileiros) refers to Brazilians of full or partial German ancestry. German Brazilians live mostly in the country's South Region, with a smaller but still significant percentage living in Southeast Region.
German descendants in São Paulo. | |
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 5,000,000–12,000,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Southern region; Southeastern region | |
| Languages | |
| Predominantly Portuguese. Great numbers speak Brazilian German dialects as their mother tongue; the largest group with est. 3,000,000 native Riograndenser Hunsrückisch speakers. | |
| Religion | |
| Roman Catholicism Protestantism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Germans, other Brazilians |
Between 1824 and 1972, about 260,000 Germans settled in Brazil, the fifth largest nationality to immigrate after the Portuguese, the Italians, the Spanish, and the Japanese. By 1940, the German diaspora in Brazil totaled about a million.
The rapid increase in numbers was due to a relatively high birth rate, the highest in Brazil amongst immigrant groups although still lower than that of the local population.
The majority settled in the Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Less than 5% of Germans settled in Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, and Espírito Santo.
According to a 1999 survey by IBGE researcher Simon Schwartzman, in a representative sample of the Brazilian population, 3.6% said they had some degree of German ancestry, a percentage that in a population of about 200 million amounts to 7.2 million descendants. In 2004, Deutsche Welle cited the number of 5 million Brazilians of German descent.
According to a 2016 survey published by Institute of Applied Economic Research, in a universe of 46,801,772 names of Brazilians analyzed, 1,525,890 or 3.3% of them had the only or the last surname of German origin, a proportion that represents about 6.7 million individuals if applied to the entire population in that year.
German dialects together make up the second most spoken first language in Brazil after Portuguese. A few Brazilian municipalities have Brazilian Hunsrückisch and Germanic East Pomeranian as co-official with Portuguese, they are located in Southern Brazil and Espírito Santo. It is estimated that between 2 and 3 million people can speak Brazilian Hunsrückisch.