Brazil's culture: a Portuguese language carrying African rhythms

How one language held across a continent

Portuguese is the official language and is spoken by about 99% of the population; only some Amerindian groups and small pockets of immigrants do not use it. That uniformity is old. Britannica counts the language among the things that held the colony together, a common bond between planters, cattlemen, miners, the enslaved and the townspeople that set them apart from their Spanish-speaking neighbours.

Brazilian Portuguese has moved apart from the language of Lisbon, mostly in its sounds, and like American English it kept several features that European Portuguese had before the nineteenth century and later dropped. Its vocabulary carries hundreds of words from Old Tupi, mostly the names of places, plants and animals, and a smaller number from African languages.

The minority languages are real and local. About 180 Amerindian languages are spoken, most of them in remote areas, and in the Amazonian municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira three of them, Nheengatu, Baniwa and Tucano, have co-official status beside Portuguese. In the South, communities descended from nineteenth-century immigrants still speak Hunsrückisch, a German dialect, and Talian, which comes from Venetian; Talian is recognised as historic heritage by Rio Grande do Sul. Brazilian Sign Language, LIBRAS, was recognised by a law of 2002.

The immigrant communities left more than dialects. Settlers from Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere founded or built up the southern cities of Joinville, Blumenau, Caxias do Sul and Curitiba, and the cuisine of the South, with its polenta, salami and wine, still carries them. The court brought its books with it: the National Library in Rio de Janeiro was founded in 1810 with 60,000 volumes from the Portuguese royal library.

Where samba and capoeira came from

Samba grew from the meeting of European and African music brought by the enslaved in the colonial period, in Bahia, and its modern form was made in Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century by composers such as Noel Rosa and Cartola. It is played on a distinct set of instruments: the cuíca, a friction drum with a high squeak, the small cavaquinho of the guitar family and the pandeiro, a hand frame drum, with surdos, agogôs and tamborins behind them. UNESCO inscribed the Samba de Roda of the Recôncavo of Bahia on its list of intangible heritage in 2008.

Capoeira, a martial art, was developed in Brazil by enslaved Africans from the sixteenth century. The Wikipedia history of Brazil records that the defenders of Palmares, the seventeenth-century settlement of people who had escaped slavery, were trained in it. UNESCO inscribed the capoeira circle in 2014.

The same inheritance runs through the other forms. Choro, the instrumental music of Rio at the turn of the twentieth century, came from Brazilian players reworking the polka and the schottische under the influence of African rhythms. Maracatu in Pernambuco evolved from traditions passed down by generations of enslaved Africans and is played by large percussion groups with choirs. The dance of frevo, the Carnaval music of Recife, borrows from capoeira. Bossa nova took samba in 1958, stripped back its percussion and set it to a guitar pattern, beginning with the song Chega de Saudade by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes.

What the rest of the country listens to

Samba is the music of the coast and of Carnaval. The interior and the Northeast listen to other things. Sertanejo grew out of música caipira, the country music of the interior played on the viola caipira, and since the 1990s it has been the mainstream genre of Brazilian radio, now closer to American country music and played on acoustic guitar and accordion. It is strongest in the South and the Center-West.

The Northeast has its own set. Forró, which grew from the schottische and other European folk dances between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is danced at parties across the country and above all in the region itself. Axé, associated with the Carnaval of Salvador, mixes samba with Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In Recife the mangue beat movement fused maracatu and frevo with funk rock and hip hop. Pará, in the North, produced brega, a sentimental dance music that later spawned tecno brega. Britannica adds the cantoria of the northeastern backlands, in which singers improvise verses against each other in a duel.

Concert music runs alongside: José Maurício Nunes Garcia, a priest, is the earliest composer whose work is fully documented, in a style close to Haydn and Mozart; Antônio Carlos Gomes wrote operas on Indigenous themes to Italian librettos in the nineteenth century. The São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra has played since 1999 in the Sala São Paulo, a converted early twentieth-century railway station.

How Carnaval is organised

Carnaval falls forty-six days before Easter. Britannica describes it as a Catholic festival combined with the celebrations of people of African ancestry, which grew up in the cities of the old plantation coast between Recife and Rio de Janeiro. Its music varies with the region: samba-enredo and marchinha in Rio and the Southeast, frevo and maracatu in Pernambuco, axé in Bahia.

In Rio the unit of Carnaval is the samba school. The schools work through much of the year as community clubs and neighbourhood centres, each with several thousand dancers and musicians, and many more people build the floats and sew the costumes. They compete in the Sambadrome, a parade ground with 85,000 seats designed by Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1984. Salvador's Carnaval, in a city UNESCO lists as a City of Music, carries a stronger African element. UNESCO inscribed frevo in 2012, and in 2019 the cultural complex of Bumba-meu-boi from Maranhão.

Why the Catholic majority is shrinking

The Jesuits who arrived with the first governor-general in 1549 brought Catholicism to the colony, and it was the religion Portuguese colonists forced on the Africans they enslaved. For most of Brazil's history it was the religion of nearly everyone. The census shows how quickly that has changed.

The growth on the Protestant side is mostly Pentecostal and Evangelical, and the Wikipedia article on Brazil records the movement's growing organised weight in national politics. A 2010 agreement with the Vatican set out the legal status of the Catholic Church.

The religions of African origin stayed local and strong. Candomblé, with its orixá deities drawn from Yoruba tradition, is important in Salvador and across Bahia. Freedom House reports that Afro-Brazilian religious groups face considerable discrimination, and that in recent years temples, the terreiros, in Rio de Janeiro's favelas have closed after assaults or threats from drug traffickers who claim the territory and repress other faiths.

Brazilian Catholicism absorbed other traditions as it spread. The meeting of the Catholic Church with the religious traditions of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples produced a range of syncretic practices inside it, within the traditional Portuguese festivities. Catholic devotion keeps its public festivals. The Círio de Nazaré, the Taper of Our Lady of Nazareth in the city of Belém in Pará, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013.

What Brazilians eat

The base is Portuguese and it is plain: rice and beans. Feijoada, a stew of black beans with up to twenty kinds of dried, salted or smoked meat served with rice, has been called the national dish since the imperial period. The rest divides by region. Bahia cooks with dendê, palm oil, in dishes of African origin: moqueca, a seafood stew, acarajé, a fritter of white beans fried in the oil and filled with dried shrimp and pepper, and vatapá. The North eats tacacá and pato no tucupi. Minas Gerais has its cheese bread, pão de queijo. In Rio Grande do Sul the typical meal is churrasco and the drink is chimarrão, and churrascarias, steak houses, are found across the country.

Cachaça, the spirit distilled from sugarcane, goes into the caipirinha. Coffee is everywhere; in 2018, 28% of the coffee drunk worldwide came from Brazil, according to the Wikipedia article on its culture.

How modernism answered Europe

The modernist break came in São Paulo in 1922, in the Modern Art Week that the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti helped to organise to break with the conservative past. The painter Tarsila do Amaral and the writer Oswald de Andrade took it further in the antropofagia movement, with the Pau-Brasil manifesto, the painting Abaporu and the Anthropophagic Manifesto. In the 1930s the sociologists Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda put forward the ideas of Brazilian identity known as racial democracy and the cordial man. The composer Heitor Villa-Lobos did the same in music, weaving folk themes and rhythms of Portuguese, Indigenous and African origin into concert works.

Architecture carried the idea to the capital. Oscar Niemeyer designed the public buildings of Brasília within the plan drawn by Lúcio Costa, and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx replaced formal European gardens with native plants arranged as they grow wild. UNESCO inscribed Brasília on the World Heritage List in 1987, the Pampulha Modern Ensemble in 2016 and the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx in 2021. The colonial past had its own masters: the soapstone prophets and church façades carved in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais by Antônio Francisco Lisboa, called Aleijadinho.

Censorship shaped the next generation. After Institutional Act No. 5 in 1968 the military government censored music, film, theatre and books it judged subversive, and the Tropicália movement led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil answered it with a music that mixed Brazilian, North American and European sources. Its founders came largely from Bahia, and the movement spread into film with Glauber Rocha, into theatre and into poetry.

The literary line is long. Joaquim Machado de Assis, the son of a formerly enslaved man, was a leading voice of the nineteenth-century novel. In the twentieth the Northeast produced Graciliano Ramos and Rachel de Queiroz on drought, Jorge Amado on the cacao zone of Bahia and Gilberto Freyre on life under slavery, and João Guimarães Rosa wrote of survival and violence in the interior. Clarice Lispector and Lygia Fagundes Telles turned fiction towards psychological and existential narrative.

Who Brazilians say they are

The census asks people to describe their own colour or race, and in 2022 most placed themselves outside the category of white. 45.3% described themselves as pardo, brown or mixed, 43.5% as white, 10.2% as Black, 0.6% as Indigenous and 0.4% as East Asian, in the census term amarela, yellow. The mixing began with the colony; immigration added to it, with about four million Europeans arriving between 1880 and 1930, and communities from Japan and the Middle East besides.

Indigenous culture survives in hundreds of separate traditions. UNESCO inscribed the oral and graphic expressions of the Wajapi in 2008 and, in 2011, placed the Yaokwa ritual of the Enawene Nawe on its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. The National Indian Foundation estimated in 2007 that 67 uncontacted groups lived in Brazil, up from its estimate of 40 in 2005.