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According to some sources (https://blog.rosettastone.com/what-l...nta%20Catarina.) there are 3 million speakers in the country, it's the most common number but I've seen some sources claiming lower and higher values. It's certainly more common among elderlies in the countryside, but there are young people who speak it too. Though our dialects aren't really unified and standardized (Germans came mainly from Rhineland-Palatinate but from different dialect regions, see the Sankt Goar line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankt_Goar_line. They also came in different periods, from 1824 till 1969 https://www.dvhh.org/dta/brazil/1824-1969.htm), there have been some attempts to do so and in some towns it's taught in schools. There's no doubt they've preserved their language better than Syrians and Lebanese - who came in similar numbers but AFAIK there's no Arabic-speaking town here - and than Italians, who came in much larger numbers but whose Italian-speaking communities are much fewer even in absolute numbers. In fact, German is the second most spoken mother language here (https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/m...ages-in-brazil), though it doesn't mean that much because it's still a small number in relation to the total population.Originally Posted by Blondie
I've met some younger people whose mother language is German in my region. I've also had a 24 years old colleague who ended up being fluent in Standard German because it was compulsory in his school and not in the Eastern Pomeranian dialect his family could speak. Pomeranians are the second largest German community here.
In my case it's been lost in my family for several reasons. One of them's that it - along with Italian and Japanese- was prohibited during WWII (see image below) and thus when my grandpa was a child his family's house was "visited" by government officials. After that they ended up integrating more and to his parents' protest he married my grandma who wasn't from a German family, so he didn't speak German with her and their children and because of that my mom and her siblings could only hear German when they visited their grandparents. So the second reason would be assimilation and mixing.
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