Santo was 73,000 in 1960, 145,000 in 1980 and 250,000 in 2004. End of expansion If in the beginning Germans found a region with vast empty areas, later with the compulsory occupation of the lands, the German expansion came to an end. As they expanded, the German settlements encountered the pastoral areas of the gaúchos to the west and south. The Gaúcho area was an impoverished region consisting of huge farms, dominated by a small elite of landowners who monopolized the lands and a mass of underemployed people who worked for them in poor conditions, similar to the rest of Brazil and very different from the areas of German settlements, where each family had their own small farm. Due to the expansion of German and other European settlements in Southern Brazil, the lands for each family became limited because there was no more land available. Plots of land previously settled by a single family started to be occupied by two or four families. Without their own land, some descendants of Germans regressed to a situation of poverty, mingling with the mass of gaúchos and descendants of Azorean Portuguese who make up the poor in Southern Brazil, in search of land to work. Culture Language The use of the German language is in decline in Brazil, however, there are 3,000,000 Brazilians who speak German and important German-speaking communities in Brazil even almost 200 years after the beginning of immigration. According to Born and Dickgiesser (1989, p. 55) the number of Brazilians of German descent in 1986 was 3.6 million. For Rio Grande do Sul, based on data from Birsa (Bilingualism in Rio Grande do Sul), for 1970, Altenhofen (1996, p. 56) estimated at 1,386,945 the number of speakers of a variety of German. As of 1996, he estimated that it had dropped to between 700,000 and 900,000 speakers. Damke (1997, p. 59), as of 1996, estimated more than 2 million speakers of any variety of the German language in Brazil. German immigrants preserved their language more than any other group of immigrants in Brazil. This was mainly due to shared cultural identity and the desire to recreate in Brazil an environment with characteristics of the country they believed they would never return to. In addition, the large differences between the German and Portuguese languages hindered learning of the national language of Brazil, which was and remains a pretext for continuing use