I dedicate this essay to my grandfather Artibano—my great-grandfather—with whom I had the privilege of spending my earliest childhood, learning to snap my fingers and whistle to fill quiet moments.
The language we speak at home is rarely seen as something political.
Yet it is.
Languages carry memories, emotions, family histories, and ways of understanding the world. When a language disappears, it takes far more than words with it.
In Brazil, the loss of heritage languages has been a quiet process, shaped both by historical repression and by more subtle forms of cultural assimilation. It is not an isolated phenomenon. It spans generations, families, and communities, linking Brazil’s past to the present-day experiences of Brazilian families living abroad.
In my own family, this story is deeply personal.
My great-grandfather immigrated from Italy during the major migration waves of the early twentieth century. Italian was the language of his daily life, his relationships, and his identity.
That language never reached me.
Somewhere between his generation and mine, it disappeared—taking with it part of my own cultural inheritance.
In many ways, I am the result of that process: living evidence of a cultural silence that did not emerge by chance, but was gradually constructed over time.
The Estado Novo and the Institutional Suppression of Languages
During Brazil’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1937–1945), language suppression became official government policy.
Under the Nationalization Campaign, public use of several immigrant languages—including German, Italian, and Japanese—was prohibited. Community schools were closed, educational materials were confiscated, and speaking these languages in public could lead to punishment.
As anthropologist Giralda Seyferth has observed, this reveals a profound paradox: the same state that had encouraged immigration to populate and develop the country later persecuted the very languages and cultures those communities had brought with them.
Yet this process began much earlier.
Since the colonial period, Brazil has often pursued national unity by privileging Portuguese while suppressing other languages. In 1758, for example, the Directory of the Indians prohibited the use of Nheengatu, the General Language spoken across large parts of colonial Brazil.
This history reflects what Brazilian philosopher Sueli Carneiro describes as epistemicide: the systematic erasure of ways of knowing, speaking, and existing.
Linguistic silencing, therefore, is not an exception in Brazilian history.
It has been one of its recurring patterns.
Subtractive Bilingualism and the Monolingualism of Survival
Perhaps that is why there is something profoundly ironic about my own work today.
I now dedicate myself to helping Brazilian families abroad preserve Portuguese—the very language that, within Brazil, once contributed to silencing so many others.
Faced with discrimination and exclusion, many immigrant families believed they were protecting their children by no longer passing on their ancestral languages.
Sociolinguists describe this process as subtractive bilingualism: one language is not added alongside another but gradually replaced by it.
For many families, this decision was shaped by trauma rather than choice.
The result was what might be described as a monolingualism of survival.
Its consequences remain visible today.
Many Brazilians descended from European, Indigenous, African, or Asian communities feel connected to histories they can no longer fully access.
The language that could have served as a bridge has become an absence.
What remains is often a difficult feeling to describe—a sense of incomplete belonging shared across generations.
Portuguese as a Heritage Language: The Third-Generation Challenge
This history offers an important lesson for the present.
Today, millions of Brazilians live outside Brazil, particularly across Europe and North America.
Within these communities, increasing attention has been given to Portuguese as a Heritage Language—the effort to maintain Portuguese within families across generations.
History suggests that, without intentional support, heritage languages rarely survive indefinitely.
Joshua Fishman, one of the leading scholars of intergenerational language transmission, argued that languages survive only when they continue to be spoken within families.
Across immigrant communities, a familiar pattern often emerges.
The first generation speaks the heritage language.
The second generation grows up bilingual.
By the third generation, unless families intentionally maintain the language, the dominant language usually prevails.
The heritage language rarely disappears overnight.
Instead, it slowly fragments into isolated words, familiar expressions, family recipes, songs, and fading memories.
Yet preserving Portuguese should never mean overlooking this complexity.
Brazilian families abroad rarely have a single cultural identity.
They may simultaneously be Brazilian while also carrying Italian, Japanese, Indigenous, African, Lebanese, German, or many other family histories.
Portuguese itself embodies a paradox.
Within the diaspora, it is often a language of affection, belonging, and family connection.
Within Brazil’s own history, however, it has also served as an instrument of linguistic assimilation.
Breaking the Silence Between Generations
Preserving one language should never require silencing another.
On the contrary, multilingualism creates space for different languages, memories, and identities to coexist.
Supporting Portuguese as a Heritage Language also means recognizing this complexity without reproducing the same patterns of linguistic silencing that shaped the past.
Brazilian history has already shown us what happens when languages stop being passed from one generation to the next.
The silence between generations is not simply the loss of words.
It is the loss of memories, relationships, identities, and ways of understanding the world.
Fortunately, we still have the opportunity to choose a different path.
Breaking that silence requires intention, meaningful learning experiences, and educational resources that help families keep Portuguese alive with affection, cultural depth, and pride.