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This paper aims to contribute to the rich discussion that has been developed in this journal throughout previous editions. Many authors have already written here about their considerations and praxis regarding bilingualism, bilingual contexts and bilingual education from different perspectives. Thus, this paper also brings to discussion aspects of the education in bilingual settings in Brazil, where people speak Portuguese and a variety of German basis called Hunsrückisch as their mother tongue. Moreover, this paper aims to be an account of results from different researches, which deal with the advantages of speaking dialect to learn standard German and the prejudices, learners coming from minority languages confront.
As linguist, we always have to deal with terms like First, Second and Foreign Languages, but many times we don’t notice, how peculiars they are and how specific and difficult are their definitions. In Brazil, we have peculiar situations of immigrant languages, which are spoken in some groups of people in some communities in their day-by-day. There is much controversy related to the denomination we give to these linguistic varieties, what concerns its status and its relationship with the other neighbor or concurrent varieties. In this paper, we intend to discuss theoretically the terms above, transporting the denomination and its application to the reality of some bilingual communities from Rio Grande do Sul, in which people speak minority languages of Germanic origins. On the basis of empirical tests, we aim to give here a profile of the socio linguistic situation of these minority varieties what concerns its speakers, the foreign language teachers (specially of the High-German) and the community in general.
This paper discusses a foundation for writing Hunsrückisch as a German immigrant language in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. This foundation brings together the main conclusions obtained by the Group for the Studies of Hunsrückisch Writing (Grupo de Estudos da Escrita do Hunsrückisch – ESCRITHU). This group was formed at the Language Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with the goal of proposing not only a system of orthographic norms for a language that exists mostly just in oral forms, but also to encourage research on and linguistic education for speakers of this immigrant language. An already extant literature in Hunsrückisch includes journal and magazine texts such as Sankt Paulusblatt or the Brummbär-Kalendar, published between 1931 and 1935, as well as texts by authors such as Rambo (2002 [1937-1961]), Gross (2001), and Rottmann (1889 [1840]). From these texts various writing formats, guidelines, and goals for an orthographic norm are analyzed, be they for the written expression of the speakers or for useful instruments in the transliteration of ethnotexts within the ALMA-H project (Linguistic- Contactual Atlas of the German Minorities in the La Plata Basin: Hunsrückisch), with which ESCRITHU collaborates.