As Dublin’s Brazilian population has grown, so has demand for Portuguese classes

At 9am on a recent Wednesday morning, the entrance to St Paul’s CBS Secondary School in the north inner-city was filled with boys waiting to get into class.

Some chatted, others silently watched. Two students strummed guitars.

A few minutes later, upstairs, on the second floor, Luiz Gasparelli welcomed his transition year students.

“Good morning! How are you?” he said, adding a cheerful, “Bom dia, beleza!”

“Beleza,” one of the students replied as he walked in carrying a guitar.

From Brazil, Gasparelli has been teaching Portuguese classes in Irish schools since September 2020, including the language and Portuguese and Brazilian cultures.

“Today’s class is about music,” Gasparelli said.“Do you remember the rhythm presented by the Portuguese embassy?”

Gasparelli was referring to a visit by the embassy on 26 February

“Fado,” one of the students responded.

“Yes,” Gasparelli said.

At the moment, there are eight schools teaching Portuguese in Dublin, says Kenia Puig i Planella, the teaching and learning manager from Post-Primary Languages Ireland.

Some students in those classes don’t have a connection to Brazilian or Portuguese cultures and just want to learn, but some do – and want to strengthen those connections through the lessons.

The number of Brazilians living in Ireland has tripled from about 9,000 in 2011 to about 30,000 in 2022, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO). And the number of Portuguese has tripled too, from about 2,000 to about 6,000 during that period, it says.

Other sources put the number of Brazilians much higher. For example, an estimate published by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated that approximately 80,000 were living in Ireland in 2022.

Whatever the exact number, many of those people have family in Portugal or Brazil who don’t speak English, and children born here who only speak English. For them, the language can help connect generations across oceans.

Portuguese as a heritage language

Before teaching in Irish schools, Gasparelli volunteered for three years at AMBI, an association of Brazilian families in Ireland.

The volunteer-run organisation focuses on bringing Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language to Brazilians and their children in Ireland, says AMBI coordinator Aline Polido Moreira.

“We have parties, summer camps, and Portuguese classes,” Moreira said on 8 March, during a Carnival party that AMBI organised for children.

Tais de Medeiros was there that day, with her daughter. “This is our third year here,” she says.

When her daughter was very small, she only spoke Portuguese with her, and her dad spoke Swahili with her. But then, seven months ago, the girl started creche.

“At first, her dad wanted her to speak only English, but I said no,” says Medeiros. “Portuguese is really important for her to know.”

It’s part of her heritage, she says. “My family doesn’t speak English, so it’s important for her to know how to communicate when she goes to Brazil.”

At the moment the little girl prefers to speak in English. But her mother, Medeiros, sticks just to Portuguese with her, she says.

Nowadays, the girl’s father is on board with it all, says Medeiros. “He is very proud of his daughter speaking Portuguese.”

Barbara Pereira tells a similar story.

She and her Irish husband have a daughter. “I only speak Portuguese with her,” says Pereira, also at the Carnival party.

“I want my daughter to have this opportunity,” she says. “She was born here, but she is still a mini Brazilian.”

Bridging cultures

Portuguese language and culture classes can also build understanding across cultures, says Gasparelli, the teacher at St Paul’s CBS.

“Building a cultural bridge between Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries, as well as Ireland and others that reside here, helps to diminish biases,” he says.

Gasparelli used to teach at Greenhills Community College. Even when he moved on, the school decided to keep the classes, says programme coordinator Margaret Brosnan.

“We built a great rapport with the lads in his class, and they really enjoyed it,” Brosnan says. “That’s why we want to bring it back every year.”

Estela Felipe, who is from Brazil, now teaches the classes at Greenhills. The students are very interested in the broader culture, which helps to break stereotypes, she says.

“Students engage with real-life contexts, history, and traditions beyond the clichés, fostering a more open and inclusive mindset within the school environment,” she says.

During one of her classes, the students gathered sweets and correctly pronounced their quantity and colours in Portuguese.

Afterwards, they got to play football. “Sports is a way to build a bridge with them,” she says.

They’ve done capoeira too, says Felipe, who brought in Renato Scapin for that session.

With capoeira – a martial art with elements of dance, acrobatics and music – the names of the movements and the music are all expressed in Brazilian Portuguese, says Scapin.

So as capoeira spreads around the world, it brings the language with it, he says. Girls in Felipe’s classes really got into it, she says.

“The girls liked taking a class that combines history with body movement,” Felipe says.

Paula Falcão, who also teaches Portuguese in schools, says she too puts an emphasis on “communicative teaching”, where language is taught through cultural activities.

Activities such as a day in the kitchen, when students make foods such as pastéis de nata, play traditional games, watch music performances with Filipa Quintino, and do capoeira, she says.

In class

“Do you know what the most famous type of Brazilian music is?” asks Gasparelli, that morning on the second floor at St Paul’s CBS.

“Tchú tchá, tchú tchá,” one student says, sounding out a beat.

“Funk,” another student says, naming it.

“Yes, [funk] it comes from Rio and São Paulo, and typically from the favelas. There are other rhythms, and samba is one of the most important types of music we have,” he says.

Gasparelli plays “Mas Que Nada”, a samba tune: “Oh, ariá-raiô Obá, obá, obá.”

He says: “The word [samba] comes from Africa. About 100 years ago, we mixed African rhythms with Portuguese rhythms, like fado, to create samba.”

After Portugal colonised Brazil, over the centuries that followed, Portuguese planters brought millions of enslaved people from various parts of Africa to work for them in South America. Slavery was abolished there in 1888.

Gasparelli asks the students, “What is the most important part of the body in Irish dancing?”

“Feet,” a student replies.

“Do you know the most important part of the body in samba?”

“The hips?”

“Yes, the hips,” Gasparelli says.

“Do you know how to say ‘hips’ in Portuguese?”

“I think I know: ‘bunda’,” says one of the students.

“Bunda is how Brazilians say it, not the Portuguese,” says Gasparelli.

Gasparelli starts to play a video of an African rhythm called batuku that originated samba.

Look at the dancing, he says. “This rhythm is from a place called Cape Verde and has been around for more than 300 years.”

He tells them a story about its supposed origins.

“The Portuguese wanted to capture the men to make them slaves, while the women were by the lake washing clothes. They could see the boats arriving,” he says.

“They started to make sounds so the men could run, ” he says. “But the noise would be obvious and the women started dancing.”

“The drums and rhythms arrived in Brazil, and then samba was born,” he says.

After showing a video about Carnival, Gasparelli presents a picture of Heloísa Pinheiro, a Brazilian socialite famous for being the face of the song “The Girl from Ipanema”.

“Let’s move on to bossa nova, a mix between samba and jazz,” he says.

Samba is rooted in the Black community. What this means in Brazil is that it is generally associated with the working class, he says.

“The upper class said: samba is too bad, let’s mix with jazz,” says Gasparelli.

The irony lies in who created jazz, he says, leaving the students to fill in the blank.

“Black people,” one of the students replies.

Gasparelli gives the students an exercise to fill in the gaps in the lyrics of “The Girl from Ipanema” with the missing Portuguese words, as he loops the music several times.

Some classes emphasise culture, others focus more on language. “Every class is different,” said Gasparelli, later.

Portuguese for the Leaving Cert

Portuguese was added as a Leaving Cert subject in 2020, along with Lithuanian, Polish and Mandarin.

The curriculum is designed to accommodate both variants of the language, the Portuguese version and the Brazilian version.

Registration for Portuguese classes for the upcoming school year is now open.

In 2024, 276 students took the exam, up 47 percent from the previous year. It’s the 11th most popular foreign language taught in schools in Ireland, according to a report from the Portuguese Embassy.

Tatiana Sousa, who is from Portugal, moved to Ireland when she was about seven years old, she says, during an online class on 23 March to prep for the Leaving Cert.

She may look to study in Portugal after she finishes school here, she says. But her main drive is to connect with family.

“My cousins don’t speak English, and I started to lose a bit of the connection with them because I couldn’t write messages in Portuguese,” Sousa says.

Now, she can write more fluently. “I can communicate with them and my grandparents as well,” she says.

Paulo Fanning, another student in the class, says he too can now communicate better with his grandmother and his family from his mother’s side in Portugal.

For other students, it’s not about connecting to family overseas, but about connecting with friends in Ireland.

Miguel Conceição appreciates talking with classmates from shared or similar cultural backgrounds, he says.

“There’s an extra layer to explain historical and political context when talking to someone from another culture,” he says.

Iris Ribeiro speaks Portuguese at home with her parents but establishing friendships in her language is her favorite part of the classes, she says. “I like to speak Portuguese with people my own age.”