msamba

26 Oct 2026
In 1697 a bishop met one of the most famous men in colonial Brazil, and the man turned up with an interpreter. He was a Portuguese colonist, and he couldn’t speak Portuguese properly.

For well over a century, a lot of Brazil’s colonists grew up speaking língua geral, a language built from Tupi. It was the home language around São Paulo, and in the Amazon it was more widely spoken than Portuguese until the late 1800s. In this one I look at how that happened, how the bandeirantes who spoke it pushed Brazil far past the Tordesillas line, and what it took for Portuguese to win in the end: a gold rush, a ban, a brutal war and the rubber boom.

It’s still spoken today, too. It’s called Nheengatu, and in 2023 Brazil’s Constitution was translated into it.

This is the third in my series on colonial languages, after the Philippines and Indonesia.

Which country should I do next? Let me know in the comments.

0:00 Intro
1:04 A line on the map
2:05 Hardly any Portuguese
3:06 The priests learn Tupi
4:07 Spoken at home
5:21 The bandeirantes
6:29 Gold
7:12 The ban
8:05 The Amazon holds out
9:19 Still spoken
10:32 So why Portuguese?

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