Pomerode
| Pomerode | |||
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North gate in Pomerode
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| Nickname(s): A cidade mais alemã do Brasil (The most German city in Brazil) |
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 Location of Pomerode |
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 Pomerode
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| Coordinates: 26°44′27″S 49°10′37″W / 26.74083°S 49.17694°WCoordinates: 26°44′27″S 49°10′37″W / 26.74083°S 49.17694°W | |||
| Country |
 Brazil
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| Region | South | ||
| State |
 Santa Catarina
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| Founded | January 21, 1959 | ||
| Government | |||
| • Mayor | Rolf Nicolodelli | ||
| Area | |||
| • Total | 215.904 km2 (83.361 sq mi) | ||
| Population (2015) | |||
| • Total | 25,000 | ||
| • Density | 114/km2 (300/sq mi) | ||
| Time zone | UTC-3 (UTC-3) | ||
| • Summer (DST) | UTC-2 (UTC-2) | ||
| HDI (2000) | 0.849 | ||
| Website | www.pomerode.sc.gov.br | ||
Pomerode (Portuguese: [pomeˈɾɔdʒi]) is a Brazilian municipality in the state of Santa Catarina, in Southern Brazil. It is located in the valley of the Itajaí-Açu river, not very far from the city of Blumenau, one of the largest cities in the state.
Pomerode is known as the most German city in Brazil, because the vast majority of its inhabitants are of German descent and are bilingual in German and Portuguese.
Pomerode was founded by Pomeranian Germans in 1861 and is considered the "most typically German of all German towns of southern Brazil".
One very remarkable characteristic about Pomerode is the fact that 90% of its residents speak German. The dialect they speak is called Pommersch.
In Pomerode, as in some other localities in southern Brazil (Santa Maria de Jetibá, Espírito Santo, among them), the German language is not a foreign language, but a Brazilian linguistic regionalism.
For a good part of the 20th century, the Brazilian government did not encourage people to speak German. As a matter of fact, at times it was actively repressed and prohibited, like during Getúlio Vargas's presidency. Today, after a long period of suppression, German is part of the curriculum in local schools and tolerated if not always encouraged by regional governments throughout southern Brazil.
Pomeranian German (i.e. Pommersch, not to be confused with Slavic Kashubian which is in English also called Pomeranian) is spoken by most town inhabitants of Pomerode, along with Portuguese, mainly by younger people. German-extraction Brazilians who are still bilingual speak the dialect of the regions they came from. In Santa Catarina this is Northern Germany, from Bremen to Danzig. In Rio Grande do Sul it is from the Hunsrück area south-west of Frankfurt and substantially different, at least to Germans.
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Wikipedia