Portuguese language
Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language in the world (outnumbered only by Spanish - see also Iberian Romance Languages), spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor, Cape Verde, Mozambique and the Macau Special Administrative Region of China.Portuguese is also spoken in Goa in India, but by an increasingly small minority, while in Malacca in Malaysia, there is a Portuguese creole known as Cristao still spoken by some of the Eurasian population, although it is almost extinct. In a Unesco report from 2000 it is stated that Portuguese is spoken by 176 million people worldwide. It is an official language of the European Union and Mercosul, among other organizations.
CPLP (Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries) is an international organization grouping the eight independent countries which have Portuguese as official language.
Portuguese-speaking countries are sometimes divided between those who have Portuguese as national language - Portugal and Brazil - and those for which Portuguese is only an official language, with many others also spoken by the population. In Brazil, there are also some other languages, spoken by Native Americans - however, their importance is quite small. In Portugal, there is another officially recognised language, called Mirandese, spoken by a few thousand people in Northeast Portugal.
In the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, known as Paises Africanos de Língua Oficial Portugues (PALOP), indigenous African languages are more widely spoken, although in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, the most widely-spoken language is a Portuguese creole known as Crioulo. In East Timor the national language is Tetum, which is Austronesian, but heavily influenced by Portuguese. The reintroduction of Portuguese as an official language has caused suspicion and resentment among some younger East Timorese who have been educated under the Indonesian system, and do not speak it.
There are some differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese in vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax, especially in popular varieties. Often speakers of the Brazilian variety find it hard to understand the European one. However, these differences are natural in international languages spoken in far-away territories.
Territories where Portuguese is spoken
As a national language:
As an official language:- Angola
- Cabo Verde
- East Timor
- Guinea-Bissau
- Macau, People's Republic of China
- Mozambique
- Sao Tome and Principe
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The phonetics of Portuguese are rather complicated. In comparison with the related Spanish language, there is no simple rule for the pronunciation of vowels, and some consonants also have multiple values. European and Brazilian Portuguese differ somewhat.
The tilde indicates a nasalized vowel. It occurs over two vowels, ã and õ, and in several diphthongs such as ão and ãe. The nasal sounds may also be indicated by a following m, as in bom ('good').
Unstressed o is normally /u/, and unstressed a is normally an open central vowel.
There are palatal consonants lh and nh (the equivalent of Spanish ll, ñ). The consonants ch, j are postalveolar fricatives, SAMPA /Z/strong> when final or followed by another voiceless consonant is /S/, or before a voiced consonant /Z/. So the former currency escudo is /@SkuDu/, plural escudos /@SkuDuS/. This peculiarity is only valid however in Portugal and in the metropolitan area of the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In other regions of Brazil and other former Portuguese colonies, the s is merely voiced (to /z/) when before a voiced consonant.
Portuguese is similar in many ways to Spanish, but there are enough differences, in both writing and speech, so that a speaker of one may require some practice to effectively understand a speaker of the other. Compare, for example:
Portuguese speakers are generally able to read Spanish Castilian, and Spanish Castilian speakers are generally able to read Portuguese, even if they can't understand the spoken language. Tourists in Portugal should note that trying to communicate with the locals in Spanish may seem offensive.
Galician can be seen as a somewhat castilianized form of Portuguese. Linguists have always recognized the unity of these linguistic varieties (for instance, Corominas, Lindley Cintra, Coseriu, etc), as they were once just the same language and both are relatively conservative varieties. However, in practice, they are treated sometimes as different languages by both populations mainly due to sociolinguistic issues, with works in Galician being translated into Portuguese and vice versa. The current Galician Autonomous Government backs a standard of Galician which distances it from Portuguese and makes it, graphically, more similar to Castilian Spanish. Nevertheless, there is another standard, used in some political circles and universities that basically treats Galician as a Portuguese dialect with minor differences. During the Middle Ages, Galician and Portuguese were undoubtedly the same language, nowadays known as "Galego-Português", or Galician-Portuguese, a language used for poetic works even in Castille.
Brazilian Portuguese is the same language as in Portugal. However, a few words and expressions are written differently (like 'bus' - "ônibus" (Braz.) = "autocarro" (Port.) ).
In some places, Spanish and Portuguese are spoken almost interchangeably. There is a town on the Brazil/Paraguay border, for example, known in Brazil as Ponta Porã and in Paraguay as Pedro Juan Caballero, where conversations regularly switch back and forth between the two languages. (To add to this rich diversity, many people in the region also speak Guarani.).
Speakers of other Romance languages may find a peculiarity in the conjugating of certain apparently infinite verbs. In particular, when constructing a future tense or conditional tense expression involving an indirect object pronoun, the pronoun is placed between the verb stem and the verb ending. For example, Dupondt said trazer-vos-emos o vosso ceptro. Translating as literally as possible, this is "bring (stem)-to you (formal)-we (future) the your sceptre". In English we would say, "We will bring you your sceptre." The form Nós vos traremos o vosso ceptro. is also correct, although far less common in Portugal, but more common in Brazil.
Phonetics
Comparison with other languages
Almost all words in Spanish or Portuguese have close relatives in both languages if you are cultivated enough to use less common words:
(Which translates as "She always closes the window before having dinner.")
