Colonies Keep Foreign Culture and Dialect in Brazil's Countryside

01/02/2017 - 13h09

It is difficult to understand what the women of Colombo, a city in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Paraná 15 kilometers from Curitiba, say.

Mixed with sentences in Portuguese, they say "Ma varda, che bruti mistiri" ("look at that ugly thing") or "Sboraminti, tusi" ("messy children").

It resembles Italian, but it is not. Amid laughter and memories, they speak Venetian, a dialect from their parents' and grandparents' land. The dialect has nearly disappeared in Italy.

"It is like going back in time," says Italian researcher Giorgia Miazzo, 39, who has a Doctorate degree in linguistics from the University of Venice and visited the region this year. "That is where you can find the last Italians."

Colonies like Colombo preserve the language and traditions that have been nearly lost in their countries of origin and attract researchers who want to know how they have kept the traditions for almost 200 years after the first immigrants came to Brazil.

The immigrants' isolation and religious habits account for the traditions maintained. "Things are quite different there: these are small cities, most of them in rural areas, where mobility is very restrict," says Cristiane Horst, a professor at Fronteira Sul Federal University. "It is virtually the same language that arrived in Brazil back in 1824."

Not only the language, but also the traditions are preserved.

Among immigrants from the Ukraine, customs such as the Pysanka, eggs decorated for spring and Easter celebrations, have been kept for a long time and more intensely in Brazil than in the Ukraine.

Anthropologist Paulo Guérios, of the Federal University of Paraná, says the customs and languages only continue if they still make sense and if they naturally mix with the Brazilian culture.

Translated by THOMAS MUELLO

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