- Hey there! This is Conor, the Language
Tsar so in this video I'm going to talk
about Polish culture in the south of
Brazil. Yeah, I know that's not what you
think when you think of Brazil obviously.
You think of samba, surf,
sexy girls dancing very crazily and the
debaucherous scene of carnival but there are
other minority cultures in Brazil. Brazil
is an enormous country. It's half a
continent basically and in the very
south of Brazil ... I've been doing ... done a
few videos about the other cultures that
I managed to encounter like German-
speaking, Italian-speaking, Ukrainian-
speaking in the south of Brazil that I
witnessed firsthand myself earlier this
year, the beginning of 2016 and as part of
that project I also went in search of Polish
speakers. I actually don't speak Polish. I do
speak at least some of the ... I
speak German, Italian quite well and I do
speak some Ukrainian and I did as well
as Russian which is a cognate language so
usually you can kind of understand a lot
of what people are saying if they use
those languages to get a more or less
not to say that they are the same but with Polish, I don't
speak Polish but I did go to the south
of Brazil and I went to Paraná state and
I found in Curitiba, the capital lots
of remnants of Polish culture. They have
a Polish park there. It's called Pope John
Paul the Second Park who's obviously the
Pope from Poland. Yeah he was there
during the ... especially in the Cold War he's
quite a prominent, I guess global figure at
the time, political, as well as, religious.
So you have those vestiges of Polish
culture in the south of Brazil but you
don't have some many native speakers. I actually
couldn't find anyone who spoke Polish and
that's even though 1 million people in
the state of Paraná alone are
supposedly of Polish descent. Now here's
a little clip of people speaking polish from my
my friend Aline who works at the local
TV station. She's a TV presenter there,
a journalist and she did find Polish
speakers so here's a little bit of a
clip about Polish culture in the south
of Brazil.
-
- For the Carcosky family in Serra na Garanta
the table is a place for confraternizing and for lots of abundance.
This is pork, cold pork legs,
horseradish, rolls with honey,
minced pork, bread,
podkolany, dumplings with pig head,
smoked pork ...
So even though I couldn't find Polish speakers myself I
did think a little bit about why that
might be. So the difference as to why
Polish has not survived as a spoken
language to the same extent as say German,
Italian and Ukrainian in the south of
Brazil it's probably because of several
factors. One of them is the fact that
Poles intermarried very quickly. Now that
means that if you marry someone who
doesn't speak natively Polish in their
case so maybe they spoke Italian, German maybe
Portuguese, Spanish, French whatever how
maybe Arabic if they were Lebanese or
Japanese if they're Japanese then
what are you what are you kids gonna
speak? Maybe they speak Polish to some
extent but there's less of an incentive
because when one of the parents doesn't speak
it so as a result of that Polish yeah they
just integrated quicker and adopted
Portuguese as their main language.
The second reason I can think about is
economics. Now German was really
important south of Brazil up until the
Second World War. It was actually the lingua
franca in large parts of the south of
Brazil. That's because Germans had a lot
of economic power and they were ... people
just who didn't speak German natively wanted to speak
German to do business with them and it
became important to know German as well
as Portuguese. Now this ended basically
with the policy, Brazilian government's
policy of Brazilianization
where they tried to stop people
in south of Brazil or everyone in Brazil from
speaking other languages other than
Portuguese. Now they have political
reasons for that. There was a war in
Europe obviously and the Nazis were in
power in Germany and they were worried
that maybe they would have issues in
Brazil if people in the south of Brazil were not
loyal to the Brazilian state. This is
actually because they had been a war in
the south of Brazil which took place in the
19th century. There was a war for secession. I spoke
about that in my other video
about Italian Brazilians and Garibaldi
for example. He was one of the leaders of
the secession. Now because of that people
didn't have an incentive ... because the
economic strength of Germans in the
south of Brazil people didn't have as
big an incentive to learn like Ukrainian, Polish,
Russian whatever other minority language it
was. They would start to learn you know
German as a second language after Portuguese so
this kind of hastened the demise of I
guess the importance of Polish, of the
Polish language in the south of Brazil
even though there were such a large
number of immigrants who had originally moved
from Poland. Now so they're my reasons
about why the Polish language is not as strong
as in the as the others in the south of Brazil.
It does exist and they're definitely you
know Polish cultural organizations. There is
still a diaspora. There's still some
contact with Poland itself but it's not
as strong as the other three immigrant
diasporas that I came into close contact
with so they were German, Italian and
Ukrainian when I was in the south of Brazil
earlier this year so write me in the
comments section below if you've had an
experience with Polish diaspora or one
of the other diasporas in the south of
Brazil. Let me know about your experience
interacting with them. Maybe you're from the
south of Brazil and you've kept in
contact with your historical roots
whether they happen to be in Asia, Africa
or in Europe and I love reading all your
comments so be sure to let me know how
you've experienced that this phenomenon
in the south of Brazil or somewhere else
in the world or where you've been
traveling and maybe managed to practice another
minority language because there was an
historical immigrant group there or
they have moved or they had you know
with for some historical reason found
themselves there or maybe they are even more
recent immigrants so definitely let me
know how your experience went. So that's
it from this video. That was my fourth of
four videos about my trip to
southern Brazil earlier this year about
the different communities that I met
when I went in search of Germans,
Italians, Poles and Ukrainian speakers in
the south of Brazil in Rio Grande do Sul
Paraná and Santa Catarina. Now
I'm going to be going back to Brazil
pretty soon so there are gonna be lots of
videos coming from Brazil in the next
couple of months. I have to book my
tickets but I'm guessing February so
looking forward to another great
Brazilian trip and showing you why it's my
favorite country in the world so it's 'até
logo' from this video which is
'goodbye' in Portuguese until the next one!