socioeconomic contrasts. The culture that has developed in this area, constituting the fifth largest nation in the world, is marked by the use of Portuguese as the official language. The mixture of Portuguese and Brazilian cultures makes this area subtly different from its neighbors, with their Hispanic heritage. Brazil is also the largest Roman Catholic nation in the world. The nation is also made up of many immigrant groups from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including millions of Italians, Germans, Slavs, Arabs, Japanese, and others, all of whose descendants today speak Portuguese (Nyrop xxi).
Brazilian society in the contemporary age has been marked by pronounced regional and ethnic diversity. The principal regions of the country are as follows: the industrialized and relatively prosperous South and Southeast; the impoverished agricultural Northeast and its humid littoral and arid backlands; the Center-West; and the Amazon Basin. The last two of these have
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