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Portuguese
Português
Pronunciation[puɾtu'geʃ] (European), [poɾtu'gejs] (Brazilian)
Native toBrazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and several other CPLP countries
Native speakers
213 Million people
Latin alphabet (Portuguese variant)
Official status
Official language in
Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, European Union, Guinea Bissau, Chinese S.A.R. of Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe
Regulated byInternational Portuguese Language Institute; CPLP
Language codes
ISO 639-1pt
ISO 639-2por
ISO 639-3por

Portuguese (portuguêsⓘ) is an Iberian Romance language that originated in what is today Galicia (in Spain) and Northern Portugal. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, co-official with Chinese in the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau, and co-official with Tetum in East Timor.

Portuguese is ranked sixth among the world's languages in number of native speakers (over 200 million), and first in South America (186 million, over 51% of the population). It is also a major lingua franca in Africa. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th century as Portugal set up a vast colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macau in China. In that colonial period, many Portuguese creoles appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Portuguese is often nicknamed The language of Camões, after the author of the Portuguese national epic The Lusiads; The last flower of Latium (Olavo Bilac); and The sweet language by Cervantes.

Geographic distribution

Main article: Geographic distribution of Portuguese
File:Iilp.png
The International Institute for the Portuguese Language logo depicts Portuguese as a language spoken in the eight corners of the world (the eight independent nations where it has official status).

Portuguese is the first language in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, and the most widely used language in Mozambique. Portuguese is also one of the official languages of East Timor (with Tetum) and of the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau (with Chinese). It is widely spoken, but not official, in Andorra, Luxembourg, Namibia and Paraguay. Portuguese Creoles are the mother tongue of Cape Verde and part of Guinea-Bissau's population. In Cape Verde most also speak standard Portuguese and have a native level language usage.

Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, including Montreal and Toronto in Canada; Paris in France; Asunción in Paraguay; and Boston, New Bedford, Cape Cod, Fall River, Honolulu, Houston, Newark, New York City, Orlando, Miami, Providence, Sacramento in the United States; Buenos Aires in Argentina, Uruguay, and in Japan. Other countries where speakers can be found include in Andorra, Belgium, Bermuda, Switzerland and some communities in India such as Goa. Portuguese is spoken by about 187 million people in South America, 17 million in Africa, 12 million in Europe, 2 million in North America and 610,000 in Asia.

Countries and regions where Portuguese has official status.
Countries and regions where Portuguese has official status.

The CPLP or Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries is an international organization consisting of the eight independent countries which have Portuguese as an official language. Portuguese is also an official language of the European Union, Mercosul and the African Union (one of the working languages) and one of the official languages of other organizations. The Portuguese language is gaining popularity in Africa, Asia, and South America as a second language for study.

Portuguese is with Spanish the fastest growing western language, and, following estimates by UNESCO it is the language with the higher potentiality of growth as an international communication language in Africa (south) and South America. The Portuguese speaking African countries are expected to have a combined population of 83 million by 2050.

Estação da Luz, site of the museum, in São Paulo, Brazil.

The language is also starting to gain popularity in Asia, mostly due to East Timor's boost in the number of speakers in the last five years, and Macau is becoming the Chinese center for learning Portuguese, where in early 21st century, the language use was in decline, today it is growing as it became a language for opportunity due to increased Chinese diplomatic and financial ties with the Portuguese speaking countries.

In March of 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, the city with the largest number of Portuguese speakers in the world.

Dialects

Main article: Portuguese dialects

Portuguese has two major standard dialects: Brazilian and European Portuguese (BP and EP). In addition there are several variants spoken in Africa and Asia, though these have not been subject to the same thorough research as the dialects of Brazil and Portugal. The differences between dialects both within and between the two spheres of influences are generally not very important, though the sheer number of BP speakers has led to a very large amount of various sociolects and ideolects. There are several similarities in pronunciation, syntax and simplification in grammar use between vernacular BP and Angolan Portuguese (AP), but there are no differences between standard EP and AP.

Though geographically specific vocabulary differences are common, they are not always completely consistent. Examples of words that are different in Portuguese dialects from three different continents: Africa (Angola), Europe (Portugal) and South America (Brazil).

Bus

  • Angola & Mozambique: machimbombo
  • Brazil: ônibus
  • Portugal: autocarro

slum quarter

  • Angola: musseque
  • Brazil: favela
  • Portugal: bairro de lata or ilha

Go away

  • Angola: ir embora, (or bazar as a slang - from Kimbundu kubaza - to break, leave with rush);
  • Brazil: ir embora, (or vazar as a Slang - Portuguese "to leak");
  • Portugal: ir embora, (or bazar as a slang - from Kimbundu kubaza - to break, leave with rush);

Portuguese is a member of the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Its closest relatives are Galician and the Fala. The major Romance language closest to Portuguese is Spanish. Its most distant relative among the Romance languages is Romanian.

Latin and other Romance languages

A distinctive feature of Portuguese is that the stressed vowels of Latin were not diphthongized as in other Romance languages; cf. Fr. pierre, Sp. piedra, Port. pedra, from Latin petra; It. fuoco, Sp. fuego, Port. fogo, from Latin focum. Another difference between early Portuguese and other Romance languages was the loss of intervocalic l and n, followed by the merger of the two surrounding vowels, or by the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them: cf. Lat. caelum, volare, tenere, catena, Sp. cielo, volar, tener, cadena, Port. céu, voar, ter, cadeia.

When the elided consonant was n, it often nasalized the preceding vowel: cf. Late Lat. bonum, planum, germana with Port. bom (Old Port. bõo), chão, irmã (Old Port. irmãa). This process was the source of most of the final nasal vowels and diphthongs which are characteristic of Portuguese. In particular, the Latin endings -ane-, -anu- and -one- became -am or -om in Old Portuguese. It is usually believed that the final -m of medieval spelling denoted a velar nasal consonant, as it still does in northern Portugal. But later those endings were vocalized to -ão in most dialects: cf. late Latin canem, germanum, rationem, Modern Port. cão, irmão, razão.

Even though the Romance languages are all derived from Latin, they are arguably much closer to each other than to their common ancestor. The main difference is the noun declension system of Classical Latin, an essential feature which allows great freedom in its word order, and has no counterpart in any Romance language (except to some extent in Romanian, which preserved three of Latin's seven noun cases). In this regard, the distance between Portuguese and Latin is comparable to that between English and Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, while Portuguese speakers can quickly learn to see through the spelling changes and thus recognize many Latin words, they will often fail to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.

Even though Portuguese has obvious lexical and grammatical similarities with all the other Romance languages outside of the West Iberian branch, it is not intelligible with them to any practical extent. Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary, before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa):

Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)
Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de diner. (French)
Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. (Italian)
Ea închide întodeauna fereastra înainte de a cina. (Romanian)

Note that some of the lexical divergence above actually comes from different Romance languages using the same root word with different semantic values. Portuguese for example has the word fresta, which is a cognate of French fenêtre or Italian finestra, but now means "slit" as opposed to "window". Likewise, Portuguese also has the word cear, which is a cognate of Italian cenare or Spanish cenar. Cear is used however in Portuguese to refer only to late night dinners (for example on Christmas or New Year's eve), while the most frequent word meaning "to dine" is actually jantar.

Spanish

Some of the most conspicuous phonetic differences between Spanish and Portuguese in their early period, apart from the ones already mentioned above, were:

  • The consonant clusters cl, fl, pl of Latin became ll in Spanish, but ch in Portuguese: cf. Latin clamare, flamma, plenum; Sp. llamar, llama, lleno; Port. chamar, chama, cheio.
  • The consonant clusters ct and lt of Latin became ch in Spanish, but produced diphthongs in Portuguese: cf. Latin octo, noctem, multum; Sp. ocho, noche, mucho; Port. oito, noite, muito.
  • The palatal consonants lh and nh of Portuguese typically originated from Latin li, ni, whereas Spanish ll, ñ were derived from Latin ll, nn: cf. Lat. gallina, anno, alium, Sp. gallina, año, ajo, Port. galinha, ano, alho.

In the period between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, each language went through more sound changes, which set them farther apart. A particularly notable one was the mutation of initial f to h in Spanish, which did not occur in most other Romance languages, including Portuguese. Compare e.g. Portuguese filha with French fille, Catalan filla, and Spanish hija.

Although the vocabularies of Spanish and Portuguese are quite similar, phonetically Portuguese is somewhat closer to Catalan or to French. It is often claimed that Portuguese's complex phonology compared to Spanish explains why spoken Portuguese is generally not intelligible to Spanish speakers despite the strong lexical similarity between the two languages (see the main article on Portuguese phonology for a detailed discussion). In terms of grammar, some of the peculiarities of the Portuguese language that set it apart not only from Spanish, but indeed from other Romance languages, are the synthetic pluperfect tense, the future subjunctive tense, and the so-called inflected infinitive i.e. the inflection of the infinitive form of a verb for person. Another unique feature of European Portuguese in particular is mesoclisis, i.e. the the infixing of weak pronouns in some verbal forms (see the main article on Portuguese grammar for further information).

Those few, but nonetheless common lexical differences, explain why certain simple sentences may actually be quite different in the two languages, for example:

Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)
Ella cierra siempre la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)
"She always closes the window before having dinner."

Galician

The closest language to Portuguese is Galician, spoken in the autonomous community of Galicia (Northwest Spain). It has a conservative vowel phonology, comprising only the seven vowels of medieval Galician-Portuguese, without any central vowels or nasal vowels. On the other hand, its consonants have gone through significant changes which closely parallel the evolution of the Spanish consonants; several fricatives that remain separate phonemes in Portuguese have merged in Galician in much the same way as they did in Spanish. After many centuries of close contact between the two languages, Galician has also adopted many loan words from Spanish, and some calques of Spanish syntax. Nevertheless, the morphology, general syntax, inflectional patterns, and core vocabulary of Galician are still noticeably closer to Portuguese than to Spanish. Mutual intelligibility is good between Galicians and northern Portuguese, but poorer between Galicians and speakers of central European Portuguese.

The linguistic status of Galician with respect to Portuguese is controversial. Some authors, such as Lindley Cintra, consider that they are still dialects of a common language, in spite of superficial differences in phonology and vocabulary. Other authors such as Vázquez Cuesta argue that they have become separate languages. The official position of the Galician Language Academy and of most of Galician people is that modern Galician and modern Portuguese should be considered independent languages due to major phonetic and vocabulary usage differences, and to a lesser extent, morphological and syntactical ones. The standard orthography takes advantage of the divergent features of the phonology of Galician to emphasize its differences from Portuguese, insisting on strictly phonetic spelling, and rejecting Portuguese graphic conventions such as circumflex and grave accents, tildes on vowels, or graphemes like nh, lh, j, in favour of ñ, ll, x, etc, some of them reflecting also the ancient Galician consonant spelling system, wich does not match with modern, Occitan-influenced Portuguese ortography. The sociolinguistic and linguistic situation is reminiscent of the relations between Romanian and Moldovan, or between Catalan and Occitan. However it is a mostly polytically-bonded discussion as the main supporters of the unicity of both languages have a definite profile as Galician nationalists and it is clearly oriented to preserve Galician use in front a more powerful language as Spanish.

Fala

The Fala language is another descendant of Galician-Portuguese, spoken by a small number of people in the Spanish towns of Valverdi du Fresnu, As Ellas and Sa Martín de Trebellu (autonomous community of Extremadura, near the border with Portugal).

Ladino

Ladino is a seriously endangered Romance language which was spoken by Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula until they were expelled in the late 15th century, and afterwards in various diasporic communities around the Mediterranean and in the Americas. Its endangered status is due mostly to the Nazi holocaust, and to the adoption of the revived Hebrew language by many Jews during the 20th century. The phonology of the consonants of Ladino and part of its lexicon are closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, because both retained characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance which Spanish later lost. Compare for example Ladino aninda ("still") with Portuguese ainda and Spanish aún, or the initial consonants in Ladino fija, favla ("daughter", "speech"), Portuguese filha, fala, Spanish hija, habla. However, the grammar of Ladino is closer to Spanish grammar. See also Judeo-Portuguese.

Mirandese

In the municipalities of Miranda do Douro and Vimioso (northeast Portugal, near the border with Spain), three dialects closely related to Astur-Leonese are spoken. They are called Mirandese (proper), Raian, and Sendinese, but usually designated by the generic term Mirandese in scholarly work. In 1999, the Portuguese Parliament recognized Mirandese as a language, co-official with Portuguese in the municipalities where it is spoken. A group of linguists from the University of Lisbon has set up an orthography for Mirandese, based on the spelling of Portuguese.

Derived languages

Portuguese creoles

Main article: Portuguese creole

Starting with the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African slaves, and local populations led to the appearance of many pidgin languages with varying amounts of Portuguese influence. These pidgins remained in use in parts of Asia and Africa until the 18th century.

As these pidgins became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into distinctive languages. Many of these Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creole languages are still alive today, used by over 3 million people worldwide, especially by people of partial Portuguese ancestry.

Portunhol/Portuñol

Portunhol Riverense is a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, spoken in the region between Uruguay and Brazil, particularly in the twin cities of Rivera and Santana do Livramento, where the border is open and a street is the only line dividing the two countries.

Barranquenho

In the village of Barrancos (southeast Portugal), near the border with Spain, a mixture of Portuguese and Extremaduran known as Barranquenho is spoken. It has few speakers (about 3000), and no official status.

Influence on other languages

Portuguese has lent words to many other languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Malay, Tetum, as well as in several creole languages, such as Lanc-Patuá (spoken in northern Brazil - now extinct) and Sranang Tongo (spoken in Suriname).

Portuguese had a strong influence on the language spoken around Sikka in Flores Island, Indonesia. In nearby Larantuka, Portuguese is used for prayers in the Tuan Ma ritual.

Portuguese also influenced the Lingua Geral, a language based on Tupinambá which was the lingua franca of Brazil until the 18th century.

Quốc ngữ, the modern orthography of Vietnamese, is based on 17th-century Portuguese orthography.

Sounds

Main article: Portuguese phonology

There is a maximum of 9 oral vowels and 19 consonants, though some varieties of the language have less phonemes (Brazilian Portuguese has only 7 oral vowels). Five of the vowels have nasal allophones.

Vowels

File:Portuguese vowel chart.png
Chart of Lisbon Portuguese vowels

To the seven vowels of Vulgar Latin, European Portuguese has added two near central vowels, one of which tends to be elided in relaxed pronunciation, like the e caduc of French. The five nasal vowels can be regarded as allophones of oral vowels, found in special environments. The high vowels /e o/ and the low vowels /ɛ ɔ/ are four distinct phonemes, and they alternate in various forms of apophony. Like Catalan, Portuguese uses vowel quality to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables: isolated vowels tend to be risen, and in some cases centralized, when unstressed. Nasal diphthongs exist, occurring mostly at the end of words.

Consonants

Consonant phonemes of Portuguese
Bilabial Labio-
dental 		Dental Alveolar Post-
alveolar 		Palatal Velar Uvular
Plosives p b t d k g
Nasals m n ɲ
Fricatives f v s z ʃ ʒ ʁ
Flaps ɾ
Laterals l ʎ

Whereas its vowel phonology can be considered innovative, the consonant inventory of Portuguese is fairly conservative. The medieval affricates /ts/, /dz/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/ have merged with the fricatives /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, respectively, but not with each other, and there were no other significant changes to the consonant phonemes. However, some remarkable allophones and dialectal variants have appeared, among which:

  • In most of Brazil, /t/ and /d/ have the affricate allophones [tʃ] and [dʒ], respectively, before /i/. (Quebec French has a similar phenomenon, with alveolar affricates instead of postalveolars.)
  • At the end of a syllable, the phoneme /l/ has the velarized allophone [ɫ] in European Portuguese, like in the Received Pronunciation of English. Brazilian Portuguese has the allophone [w] instead (L-vocalization).
  • In many parts of Brazil and Angola, /ɲ/ is pronounced as a nasal glide [j̃] which nasalizes the vowel before it, so that for instance /'niɲu/ is pronounced ['nĩj̃u].
  • In some dialects, the alveolar sibilant /s/ has postalveolar allophones [ʃ], [ʒ], at the end of syllables. (In Ladino, /s/ has the allophone [ʃ] at the end of syllables, too.)

Lexical stress

Portuguese features lexical stress, which can be the sole distinguishing feature of minimal pairs:

dúvida [ˈduvidɐ] "doubt (noun)" vs. duvida [duˈvidɐ] "he doubts"
falaram [faˈlarɐ̃w̃] "they spoke" vs. falarão [falaˈrɐ̃w̃] "they will speak" (in BP)
ouve ['ovi] "he hears" vs. ouvi [o'vi] "I heard" (in BP)
túnel ['tunɛl] "tunnel" vs. tonel [tu'nɛl] "wine cask" (in EP)

Primary stress may vary between any of the three final syllables of the word, but mostly on the last two. There is a partial correlation between the position of the stress and the final vowel; for example, the final syllable is usually stressed when it contains a nasal phoneme, a diphthong, or a high vowel. Portuguese spelling rules take advantage of this correlation to minimize the number of diacritics.

Prosody

Tone is not lexically significant in Portuguese, but phrase- and sentence-level stress are important. There are of six dynamic tone patterns that affect entire phrases, which indicate the mood and intention of the speaker such as implication, emphasis, reservation, etc. As in most Romance languages, interrogation is expressed mainly by sharply raising the tone at the end of the sentence.

Grammar

Main article: Portuguese grammar

Portuguese is a synthetic, fusional language. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and articles are moderately inflected: there are two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), diminutive and augmentative inflections, and a superlative inflection for adjectives. The case system of Latin has been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined (with four main types of forms, subject, object of verb, object of preposition, and possessive). Verbs are highly inflected: there are three tenses (past, present, future), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), two aspects (perfect and imperfect), and an inflected infinitive, totaling 11 synthetic conjugational paradigms. It is basically an SVO language, although SOV syntax may occur with a few object pronouns, and word order is generally not as rigid as in English. It is a null subject language, with a tendency to drop object pronouns as well, in colloquial varieties. It has two copulas.

Vocabulary

Main article: Portuguese vocabulary

Almost 90% of the Portuguese vocabulary is derived from Latin; needless to say, with substantial phonological and morphological changes which accumulated throughout its history.

One conspicuous and distinctive change was the loss of intervocalic [l] in a very large set of words, such as SALIRE → sair ("to exit"), COLARE → coar ("to drip"). Another pervasive change was the voicing of [t] in [d], as in AMATVS → amado ("loved").

Reintroduced Latin words

A few words remained virtually unchanged, like taberna ("tavern"); or even returned to a form close to the original, such as coxa ("thigh"). Many of these "retro" events happened in the late Middle Ages, due to the use of Church Latin by the Catholic Church, and during the Renaissance, when Classical antiquity in general, and Literary Latin in particular, enjoyed great prestige. Thus, for example, Latin AVRV, which had originally evolved to ouro ("gold") and dourado ("golden"), was re-introduced as the adjective áureo ("golden"). In the same way, LOCALE ("place"), which had evolved to lugar, was later re-introduced as the more erudite local. Many erudite Greek words and combining elements were also introduced or re-introduced in this way.

Contributions from other languages

Very few Portuguese words can be traced to the native or pre-Roman inhabitants of Portugal, which included the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Iberians, Lusitanians, and Celts. Some notable examples are abóbora ("pumpkin") and bezerro ("year-old calf"), from Iberian languages; cerveja ("beer"), from Celtic; saco ("bag"), from Phoenician; and cachorro ("dog"), from Basque.

In the 5th century the Iberian Peninsula (the former Roman province of Hispania) was conquered by the Suevi, Visigoths and Alans, Germanic tribes who had been displaced from Central Europe by the Huns. As they adopted the Roman civilization and language, however, these people contributed only a few words to the lexicon, mostly related to warfare — such as espora ("spur"), estaca ("stake"), and guerra ("war") from Gothic *spaúra, *stakka, and *wirro, respectively.

Between the 9th and the 15th centuries Portuguese acquired many words from Arabic by influence of the Caliphate of Cordoba, established by the Moors in the peninsula, of which about 1000 are still in use today. Those words are often recognizable by the initial Arabic article a(l)-, and include many common words such as aldeia ("village") from التجارية aldaya, alface ("lettuce") from الخس alkhass, armazém ("warehouse") from المخزن almahazan, and azeite ("olive oil") from زيت azzait. From Arabic came also the grammatically peculiar word oxalá "God willing".

Starting in the 15th century, the great expansion of Portuguese maritime exploration and trade introduced many loanwords from all over the world. Asia contributed, for instance, catana ("cutlass") from Japanese katana; corja ("rabble") from Malay kórchchu; and chá ("tea") from Cantonese cha.

From the 16th to the 19th century, the role of Portugal as intermediary in the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the establishment of large Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil, led to the borrowing of many words of African and Amerind origin, especially names for most of the animals and plants found in those territories. While those terms are mostly used in the former colonies, many became current in European Portuguese as well. From Kimbundu, for example, came kifumate → cafuné ("head caress"), kusula → caçula ("youngest child"), marimbondo ("wasp"), bungular ("dance like a wizard") from kubungula. From South America came batata ("potato"), from Taino; ananás, from Tupi-Guarani naná and abacaxi from Tupi ibá cati (two species of "pineapple"), and tucano ("toucan") from Guarani tucan; and many more.

Finally, since the Middle Ages to the present day, the Portuguese lexicon received a steady influx of loanwords from languages of its European neighbors — often in spite of strenuous efforts by the national Literary Academies to preserve the "purity" of the language. Here are only a few examples:

Spanish: melena ("hair lock"), fiambre ("ham")
French: crochet → colchete ("crochet"), paletot → paletó ("jacket"), baton → batom ("lipstick"), filet → filé ("steak"), mayonnaise → maionese
Italian: macaroni → macarrão ("pasta"), piloto ("pilot"), carrozza → carroça ("carriage"), barracca → barraca ("barrack")
Dutch: dijk → dique ("dam")
English: football → futebol, flirt → flerte, rifle, revolver → revólver, stock → estoque , knock out → nocaute, folklore → folclore

History

Main article: History of Portuguese

Portuguese developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. The language began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century, and started to be used in written documents around the 9th century. By the 15th century it had become a mature language with a rich literature. In all aspects — phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax — Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin, with relatively minor influences from other languages.

Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the Romans brought with them the Roman people's language, Vulgar Latin, from which all Romance languages descend. Already in the 2nd century BC southern Lusitania was Romanized. Strabo, a 1st century Greek geographer, comments in one of the books of his Geographia "encyclopedia": "they have adopted the Roman customs, and they no longer remember their own language." The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near previous civilizations' settlements.

Between 409 A.D. and 711, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, the Iberian Peninsula was subjected to peoples of Germanic origin, known to the Romans as Barbarians. The Barbarians (mainly Suevi and Visigoths) largely absorbed the Roman culture and language of the peninsula; however, Lusitania's language and culture were free to evolve on their own during the Early Middle Ages, due to the lack of Roman schools and administration, Lusitania's relative isolation from the rest of Europe, and changes in the political boundaries of the Iberian peninsula. These changes led to the formation of what is now called "Lusitanian Romance". From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions. However, the population continued to speak their Romance dialects so that when the Moors were overthrown, the influence that they had exerted on the language was small. Its main effect was in the lexicon.

The earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language are administrative documents from the ninth century, still interspersed with many phrases in Latin. Today this phase is known as "Proto-Portuguese" (spoken in the period between the 9th to the 12th century).

Extract of medieval
Portuguese poetry
Das que vejo
non desejo
outra senhor se vós non,
e desejo
tan sobejo,
mataria um leon,
senhor do meu coraçon:
fin roseta,
bela sobre toda fror,
fin roseta,
non me meta
en tal coita voss'amor!
João de Lobeira
(1270?–1330?)

Portugal was formally recognized by the Kingdom of Leon as an independent country in 1143, with King Afonso Henriques. In the first period of "Old Portuguese" - Portuguese-Galician Period (from the 12th to the 14th century) - the language gradually came into general use. Previously it had mostly been used on the Christian Iberian Peninsula as a language for poetry, just as Provençal was used out of Provence. In 1290, king Denis created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) and decreed that Portuguese, then simply called the "Vulgar language" should be known as the Portuguese language and should be officially used.

In the second period of "Old Portuguese", from the 14th to the 16th century, with the Portuguese discoveries, the Portuguese language spread to many regions of Asia, Africa and The Americas (nowadays, the great majority of Portuguese speakers live in Brazil, in South America). By the 16th century it had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. The spreading of the language was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people (also very common in other areas of the world) and its association with the Catholic missionary efforts, which led to it being called Cristão ("Christian") in many places in Asia. The Nippo jisho, a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary written in 1603, was a product of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan. Alexandre de Rhodes' 1651 Dictionarium Anamiticum, Lusitanum et Latinum (Annamite-Portuguese-Latin dictionary), based off the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries, introduced the modern Vietnamese alphabet based on Portuguese orthography. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.

The end of "Old Portuguese" was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The period of "Modern Portuguese" (spanning from the 16th century to present day) saw an increase in the number of words of Classical Latin origin and erudite words of Greek origin borrowed into Portuguese during the Renaissance, enriching the lexicon of the language.

Writing system

Main article: Portuguese alphabet

Portuguese is written with the Latin alphabet, and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla, to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. Brazilian Portuguese also uses the diaeresis mark. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters.

Spelling reform

As of 2005, Portuguese has two orthographic standards:

  • The Brazilian orthography, official in Brazil.
  • The European orthography, official in Portugal, Macau, and the five African Portuguese language countries.
Written varieties
Portugal & Africa Brazil translation
Different pronunciation
anónimo anônimo anonymous
Vénus Vênus Venus
facto fato fact
ideia idéia idea
Silent consonants
acção ação action
direcção direção direction
eléctrico elétrico electric
óptimo ótimo very good
Diacritics
frequente freqüente frequent
voo vôo flight

In East Timor, both orthographies are currently being taught in schools.

The table to the right illustrates some typical differences between the two orthographies. Some are due to different pronunciations, but others are merely graphic. The main ones are:

  1. Presence or absence of certain consonants: The letters c and p appear in some words before c, ç or t in one orthography, but are absent from the other. Normally, the letter is written down in the European spelling, but not in the Brazilian spelling. In most cases, it is not pronounced in any variety of the language.
  2. Different use of diacritics: the Brazilian spelling has ê or ô folowed by m or n before a vowel, in several words where the European orthography has é or ó, due to different pronunciation. The diaeresis mark is used in Brazilian spelling to indicate that the letter u is pronounced rather than silent in the digraphs gü and qü when they are followed by e or i; the European spelling no longer uses it. The Brazilian orthography distinguishes between stressed éi and stressed ei, which are pronounced differently in Brazilian Portuguese; in European Portuguese, both diphthongs are pronounced the same way, and éi appears only in some oxytone plural nouns and adjectives, by convention.

In 1990, an orthographic agreement was signed between the Portuguese language countries (except East Timor, which was under Indonesian occupation at the time), with the intent of creating a single common orthography for Portuguese. This spelling reform was meant to go into effect after all signatory countries had ratified it, but at the end of the decade only Brazil, Cape Verde and Portugal had done so. In the July 2004 summit of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, São Tomé and Príncipe ratified the agreement, and a modification was made to the text, allowing the reform to go forward in those countries which have already ratified it. This is to happen after a transition period which is yet to be defined, however.

The orthographic agreement proposes the elimination of the letters c and p from the European/African spelling whenever they are silent, the elimination of the diaeresis mark from the Brazilian spelling, and the elimination the acute accent from the diphthongs éi and ói in paroxytone words. As for divergent spellings such as anónimo and anônimo, facto and fato, both will be considered legitimate, according to the dialect of the author or person being transcribed. The agreement also establishes some common guidelines for the use of hyphens.

Galicia was also invited to take part in the reform but the Galician government ignored the invitation, since it regards Galician and Portuguese as different languages. However, an unofficial commission formed by Galician linguists who support the unity of the language attended the meetings as observers. 2

Examples

Extract of «The Lusiads» (I, 33)
Translation Original IPA
Against him supported the beautiful Venus Sustentava contra ele Vénus bela, suʃtẽˈtavɐ ˈkõtɾɐ ˈelɨ ˈvɛnuʒ ˈbɛlɐ
She was attached to the Lusitanian people, Afeiçoada à gente Lusitana, ɐfɐjsu̯ˈaða ˈʒẽtɨ luziˈtɐnɐ
Due to so many qualities she saw in them Por quantas qualidades via nela puɾ ˈku̯ɐ̃tɐʃ ku̯ɐliˈðaðɨʒ ˈviɐ ˈnɛlɐ
Of the ancient her beloved Roman; Da antiga tão amada sua Romana; dˈãtigɐ tɐ̃ũ ̯ ɐˈmaðɐ ˈsuɐ ʁuˈmɐnɐ
In the strong hearts, in the great star, Nos fortes corações, na grande estrela, nuʃ ˈfɔɾtɨʃ kuɾɐˈsõĩ ̯ʃ nɐ ˈgɾɐ̃dɨʃˈtɾelɐ
That they had shown in the Tingitana land, Que mostraram na terra Tingitana, kɨ muʃˈtɾaɾɐ̃ũ ̯ nɐ ˈtɛʁɐ tĩʒiˈtɐnɐ
And in the language, in which when she imagines, E na língua, na qual quando imagina, i nɐ ˈlĩgu̯ɐ nɐ ku̯aɫ ˈku̯ɐ̃du̯imɐˈʒinɐ
With little corruption she believes it is Latin. Com pouca corrupção crê que é a Latina. kõ ˈpokɐ coʁupˈsɐ̃ũ ̯ kɾe ki̯ɛ ɐ lɐˈtinɐ

See also

Notes

References

General

Literature

Phonology, orthography and grammar

  • International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ISBN 0-521-63751-1
  • Mateus, Maria Helena & d'Andrade, Ernesto (2000) The Phonology of Portuguese ISBN 0-19-823581-X
  • Bergström, Magnus & Reis, Neves Prontuário Ortográfico Editorial Notícias, 2004.

Reference dictionaries

Linguistics studies

  • Lindley Cintra, Luís F. Nova Proposta de Classificação dos Dialectos Galego-Portugueses Boletim de Filologia, Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Filológicos, 1971.
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