Os conceitos Língua Materna, Segunda Língua e Língua Estrangeira e os falantes de línguas alóctones minoritárias no Sul do Brasil

As linguist, we always have to deal with terms like First, Second and Foreign Languages, but many times we don’t notice, how peculiars they are and how specific and difficult are their definitions. In Brazil, we have peculiar situations of immigrant languages, which are spoken in some groups of people in some communities in their day-by-day. There is much controversy related to the denomination we give to these linguistic varieties, what concerns its status and its relationship with the other neighbor or concurrent varieties. In this paper, we intend to discuss theoretically the terms above, transporting the denomination and its application to the reality of some bilingual communities from Rio Grande do Sul, in which people speak minority languages of Germanic origins. On the basis of empirical tests, we aim to give here a profile of the socio linguistic situation of these minority varieties what concerns its speakers, the foreign language teachers (specially of the High-German) and the community in general