In Germany The
Hunsrückisch dialect, from which Hunsrik derived, has its origins in the
Moselle Franconian dialects spoken in the
Hunsrück region, on the banks of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, in western Germany. Germany, as a national state, only unified in 1871, so the
standard High German existing today was, until the 19th century, a literary language, a descendent of the one used by Martin Luther in his famous translation of the Bible. The German people, in their daily lives, did not use standard German to communicate, but several regional dialects. Until around 1800, Standard German was primarily a written language in Germany. Standard German was often learned as a foreign language and had an uncertain pronunciation. With the country's unification process and the mass literacy of the population, standard German has become the language used by speakers of different dialects to understand each other, although regional dialects have remained the language used at home.
In Brazil With
German immigration to Brazil, over the past two centuries, German dialects have also come to establish themselves as a regional language. However, something curious happened: while in Germany standard German served for speakers of different dialects to communicate, in Brazil, due to the still incipient consolidation of standard German when immigration started, this role was played by the
Hunsrückisch dialect. There are two hypotheses for this phenomenon. The first because most immigrants would have come from
Hunsrück, so their dialect predominated. The second because Hunsrückisch has intermediate features between the different German dialects, so it served as a
koiné between speakers of various dialects. What is known is that German immigrants in Brazil came from different parts of Germany, so Hunsrik-speaking Brazilians do not necessarily descend from people from Hunsrück. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were hundreds of thousands of second- and third-generation
German-Brazilians who could barely speak Portuguese. This differentiation favored the feeling of a minority group, which allied itself with the formation of solid ethnic institutions, such as schools, churches, social associations and a German-language press. All of these elements combined promoted a general feeling of "cultural group". In 1930, there were 2,500 ethnic schools in Brazil. Of these, 1,579 were from German immigrants. In these schools, children learned the standard German that is spread in Germany. This linguistic and cultural isolation was combated aggressively by the nationalist government of then Brazil's president
Getúlio Vargas, through the nationalization campaign. All German schools in the country were closed, annihilating the German-Brazilian middle school. The standard German learned at school was thus eliminated, greatly weakening the use of German in urban centers, which became limited to the countryside. People were harassed and beaten if they spoke German on the street. The police inspected people's private lives, breaking into houses to burn books written in German, or languages other than Portuguese. Many people were arrested for the simple fact that they spoke German. In 1942, 1.5% of the inhabitants of Blumenau were imprisoned for speaking German. The closure of schools has caused people to become increasingly attached to the German dialect used in everyday life, far from standard German. == Language name ==