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Home > Culture
Culture and Society
Portuguese is the language
spoken throughout Brazil. After the initial inflow of Portuguese
settlers, immigrants from several other countries, many from Italy, Germany,
Japan, Lebanon and Poland
started coming to Brazil,
to rapidly integrate with the Amerindian and African elements, each
providing its own inputs to form a truly Brazilian society. Brazil is a melting pot of peoples from
different ethnic origins and countless nationalities that are still
seasoning and adding flavors to the Brazilian cultural scene, from theatre
to cinema to television, from samba to Bossa Nova to classical music and
from architecture to sculpture to pictorial arts. The vibrant African talent has strongly
influenced the Brazilian culture and has become indelibly stamped on every
stage of its historical evolution.
Some African-Brazilian traditions are even traveling the world. One of them is ‘capoeira’, a martial
art. Sports are very much a part of
the Brazilian lifestyle and virtually all types of sports are well received
and enthusiastically practiced all over the country. Football – a.k.a.soccer – is of course
the unchallenged favourite, with each and every Brazilian unable to resist
closely following the fortunes of the national team, which in 2002 became
the first ever to win the World Cup for the fifth time.
Carnival in Brazil is
unforgettable. The parade of the
‘Escolas de Samba’ in Rio de
Janeiro makes people dance all through the night
under a magic spell of colours, rhythm and glittering costumes. All over Brazil, in the most awaited
event of the year, people crowd the streets to celebrate the joyful and
democratic happening of dancing after a band playing on a huge sound car –
a ‘trio eléctrico’, as in Salvador, or dance to the rhythm of ‘frevo’ and
‘maracatu’, as in Olinda and Recife.
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