Portuguese Language

Portuguese language, Portuguese Português, Romance language that is spoken in Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese colonial and formerly colonial territories. Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain, is closely related to Portuguese.

Portuguese owes its importance—as the second Romance language (after Spanish) in terms of numbers of speakers—largely to its position as the language of Brazil, where in the early 21st century some 187 million people spoke it. In Portugal, the language’s country of origin, there are more than 10 million speakers. It is estimated that there are also some 8 million Portuguese speakers in Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe). Portuguese is also spoken by about 678,000 people in the United States, with large communities of speakers in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Brazilian Portuguese varies from European Portuguese in several respects, including several sound changes and some differences in verb conjugation and syntax; for example, object pronouns occur before the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, as in Spanish, but after the verb in standard Portuguese. Despite differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, Portuguese is often mutually intelligible with Spanish.There are four main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: (1) Central, or Beira, (2) Southern (Estremenho), including Lisbon, Alentejo, and Algarve, (3) Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores, and (4) Brazilian. Standard Portuguese was developed in the 16th century, basically from the dialects spoken from Lisbon to Coimbra. Brazilian (Brasileiro) differs from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal in several respects, in syntax as well as phonology and vocabulary, but many writers still use an academic metropolitan standard. A Judeo-Portuguese is attested in 18th-century Amsterdam and Livorno (Leghorn, Italy), but virtually no trace of that dialect remains today.

Typical of the Portuguese sound system is the use of nasal vowels, indicated in the orthography by m or n following the vowel (e.g., sim ‘yes,’ bem ‘well’) or by the use of a tilde (∼) over the vowel (mão ‘hand,’ nação ‘nation’). In grammar its verb system is quite different from that of Spanish. Portuguese has a conjugated or personal infinitive and a future subjunctive and uses the verb ter (Latin tenere, Spanish tener ‘to have,’ ‘to hold’) as an auxiliary verb instead of haver (Latin habere, Spanish haber ‘to have’; in Spanish used only as an auxiliary verb).

Until the 15th century, Portuguese and Galician formed one single linguistic unit, Gallego-Portuguese. The first evidence for the language consists of scattered words in 9th–12th-century Latin texts; continuous documents date from approximately 1192, the date assigned to an extant property agreement between the children of a well-to-do family from the Minho River valley.

Literature began to flourish especially during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the soft Gallego-Portuguese tongue was preferred by courtly lyric poets throughout the Iberian Peninsula except in the Catalan area. In the 16th century, Portugal’s golden age, Galician and Portuguese grew farther apart, with the consolidation of the standard Portuguese language. From the 16th to the 18th century, Galician was used only as a home language (i.e., as a means of communication within the family). Toward the end of the 18th century, it was revived as a language of culture. In the 21st century, with Spanish, it is an official language of the comunidad autónoma (“autonomous community”) of Galicia. In 2008 the Portuguese parliament passed an act mandating the use of a standardized orthography based on Brazilian forms.