2272: Intro to Hunsurik: Brazil's Own German Mar 6, 2021

The language of Hunsurik, a German language spoken in Brazil, in many ways mirrored the historical process seen in the development of German in the 18th and 19th centuries. In those times, there was no standard German, neither in spelling nor in dialect. Eventually in the early 19th century this started to take place in Germany along with the unification of the country around what is now the standard, but with mass immigration to the Americas, German use in Brazil instead involved the Hunsrück dialect in part due to numerical superiority among the German immigrants. The spelling as well does not resemble that of Standard German, resembling certain aspects of Dutch and Portuguese orthography, but despite having around 3 million speakers and a number of school its writing is not standardized or even completely codified.