of German dialects. The main German dialect spoken in Brazil is Hunsrückisch, and according to Ammon, who visited German-speaking communities in Southern Brazil in 2004, the Hunsrik Language lexicon is still quite similar to that of modern German speakers, even after almost 200 years of distance. Hamel (1988, p. 64) and Damke (1997, p. 60–61) observed that there is a balance between the use of German and Portuguese in the German-speaking communities of Brazil. But, gradually, the trend is that Portuguese is becoming dominant. Despite the "myth of monolingualism in the country", i.e., that all Brazilians speak only Portuguese, German continues to have a strong presence even today. This myth is effective in hiding the country's linguistic minorities, including the indigenous nations and as well as the speakers of immigrant languages. But it also hides the majority of the Brazilian population that speaks discredited varieties of Portuguese instead of the formal standard Portuguese taught in schools. According to Oliveira (2000: 84), Brazil is one of the most multilingual countries in the world, with inhabitants speaking around 200 languages, of which about 170 are indigenous and 30 languages of immigrants. The Brazilian Census of 1940 revealed that German was the second most spoken language in Brazil, with 644,458 speakers. In a total population of nearly 1 million German Brazilians at that time, over half still spoke German as their mother tongue. The vast majority of the German speakers were Brazilian-born, with a minority born in Germany or in another German-speaking country. The other main languages spoken were Italian with 458,054, Japanese with 192,698 and Spanish with 74,381. Discrimination The "myth of monolingualism", along with the general idea that speaking Portuguese was a "condition to be Brazilian", has masked the presence of minority languages and contributed to ideas that German Brazilians were separatist and did not want to learn Portuguese or assimilate. However, these beliefs did not take into account that the German communities in Brazil were formed in places isolated by forests, where the Portuguese-speaking population was not present, and it was natural that the children continue speaking German rather than adopt the Portuguese language with which they rarely had contact. The fact that they spoke German did not prevent them from seeing themselves as Brazilians, since they saw themselves as "Brazilians of German culture". Under Getúlio Vargas's government, during World War II, when Brazil broke off diplomatic relations with Germany