Portuguese language

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

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.

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.

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

Portuguese has two main groups of dialects, those of Brazil and those of the Old World. For historical reasons, the dialects spoken in Africa and Asia are generally closer to those of Portugal than the Brazilian dialects, although in some aspects of their phonology, especially the pronunciation of unstressed vowels, they resemble Brazilian Portuguese more than European Portuguese. They have not been studied as thoroughly as European and Brazilian Portuguese. In various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Portuguese creoles are spoken, but they are independent languages which should not be confused with Portuguese itself.

Within the two major groups of language varieties, most differences between dialects concern pronunciation and vocabulary. Below are some examples:

words for bus

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

words for slum quarter

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

slang terms for to go away

• Angola: bazar - from Kimbundu kubaza - to break, leave with rush
• Brazil: vazar - from Portuguese "to leak"
• Portugal: bazar - from Kimbundu kubaza - to break, leave with rush

Between Brazilian Portuguese, particularly in its most informal varieties, and European Portuguese, there can be considerable differences in grammar, aside from the variations in pronunciation and vocabulary. The most prominent ones concern the placement of clitic pronouns, and the use of subject pronouns as objects in the third person. Non-standard noun and adjective inflections, and non-standard verb conjugations, are also common in informal Brazilian Portuguese.

1Although the word moças is not often used in European Portuguese, the intent here is to compare the morphology.

The examples in the table are in increasing degree of informality. The word order in the first Brazilian example can actually be found in European Portuguese, too, for example in subordinate clauses like Sabes que eu te amo (You know that I love you), but not in a simple sentence like "I love you." In Portugal, an object pronoun would never be placed at the start of a sentence, like in the second example. The last example in the table, with its deletion of "redundant" inflections, would be condemned even by many Brazilians, although it is often heard.

Classification and related languages

Portuguese is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Its closest relatives are Galician and the Fala. The major 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 it retained the stressed vowels of Latin, which other Romance languages diphthongized; cf. Fr. pierre, Sp. piedra, Port. pedra, from Lat. petra; It. fuoco, Sp. fuego, Port. fogo, from Lat. focum. Another characteristic of early Portuguese 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. salire, tenere, catena, Sp. salir, tener, cadena, Port. sair, ter, cadeia.

When the elided consonant was n, it often nasalized the preceding vowel: cf. Lat. manum, rana, bonum, Port. mão, rãa (now rã), bõo (now bom). This process was the source of most of the nasal diphthongs which are typical of Portuguese. In particular, the Latin endings -ane-, -anu- and -one- became -ão in most cases: cf. Lat. canem, germanum, rationem with Modern Port. cão, irmão, razão, and their plurals cães, irmãos, razões.

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 allowed great freedom of 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 Modern English and Old English. 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.

In spite of the obvious lexical and grammatical similarities between Portuguese and other Romance languages outside of the West Iberian branch, it is not mutually 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)

Ella cierra siempre la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)

Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. (Italian)

Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner. (French)

Ea închide întodeauna fereastra înainte de a cina. (Romanian)

She always closes the window before dining.

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, a cognate of Italian cenare and Spanish cenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" (for example on Christmas or New Year's eve), while the most frequent word meaning "to dine" is actually jantar.

Some unique grammatical features of Portuguese among the Romance languages are:

• The personal infinitive. It is possible for a verb in the infinitive to agree with its subject in person and number, often showing who is supposed to perform a certain act; cf. Está na hora de voltares "It is time (for you) to return.", Está na hora de voltarmos "It is time (for us) to return." This is called the personal infinitive, and no Romance language has one, except Galician and Sardinian; perhaps for this reason, infinitive clauses replace subjunctive clauses more often in Portuguese than in other Romance languages.

• The future subjunctive. This tense, developed in medieval Ibero-Romance, but now old-fashioned in Spanish, remains in vernacular use in Portuguese. It appears in dependent clauses that denote a condition which must be fulfilled in the future, so that the independent clause will occur. Other languages normally employ the present tense under the same circumstances.

• The auxiliary verb of perfect tenses: in other Romance languages, compound perfect tenses are constructed with an auxiliary verb derived from Latin habere (to have). This used to be the case in Portuguese, too, but in recent centuries the verb ter, from Latin tenere (to hold), has been steadily overtaking haver. While ter is sometimes used as auxiliary verb by other Iberian languages, it is much more pervasive in Portuguese.

• The present perfect of Portuguese has a restricted, inductive sense, denoting an action or a series of actions which have begun in the past and are expected to continue into the future. For instance, the meaning of "Tenho tentado falar com ela" may be closer to "I have been trying to talk to her" than to "I have tried to talk to her", depending on the context.

Spanish

Spanish and Portuguese have been diverging for about one millennium. A few of the most conspicuous phonetic differences between them in their early period, apart from those already mentioned above, were:

• In Spanish, initial f mutated to h, which didn't happen in other Romance languages, including Portuguese; compare e.g. Sp. hija with Port. filha, Fr. fille, It. figlia.
• The consonant clusters cl, fl, pl of Latin became ll in Spanish, but ch in Portuguese: cf. Lat. 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. Lat. octo, noctem, multum; Sp. ocho, noche, mucho; Port. oito, noite, muito.
• The palatal consonants lh and nh of Portuguese typically originated in Latin li, ni, whereas Spanish ll, ñ were derived from Latin ll, nn: cf. Lat. alium, Junius, anno, gallina, Port. alho, junho, ano, galinha, Sp. ajo, junio, año, gallina.

See the article on the Spanish language, for more examples.

Since the late Middle Ages, both languages have gone through more sound shifts and mergers of phonemes which set them farther apart.

In particular, the evolution of the sibilants took different paths in each language. In Spanish, the medieval voiced sibilants, written s between vowels, z, and j/g, merged with the voiceless sibilants ss, c/ç, and x, respectively. In Portuguese, it was the affricate sibilants c/ç, z, and ch which merged with the fricative sibilants, written ss, s between vowels, and x. Spanish kept the distinction between ch and medieval x (now written j), and the Spanish of Castile kept the distinction between ss (now written s) and medieval c/ç (now written c/z). See historical sound changes in Spanish, for more details. On the other hand, most dialects of Portuguese have kept the distinction between b and v, and the medieval values of the graphemes j/g, lh, intervocalic s, ss, and x.

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 the complex phonology of Portuguese compared to Spanish explains why it is generally not intelligible to Spanish speakers despite the strong lexical similarity between the two languages.

Broadly speaking, the grammar of Portuguese is not too far apart from the grammar of Spanish. A possible pitfall for people acquainted with one of the languages who learn the other are the verb forms with endings in -ra-, such as cantara, cantaras, cantáramos, and so on. Spanish has two forms for the imperfect subjunctive, one with endings in -se- and another with endings in -ra- (e.g. cantase, cantara), which are usually interchangeable. In Portuguese, only the former has the same value; the latter is employed as a synthetic pluperfect indicative (pretérito mais-que-perfeito simples do indicativo in Portuguese), i.e. the equivalent to Spanish había cantado.

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, which 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 politically-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

Beginning in the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African slaves, and local populations led to the appearance of many pidgins with varying amounts of Portuguese influence. As these pidgins became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into fully fledged creole languages, which remained in use in many parts of Asia and Africa until the 18th century.

Some Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creoles are still spoken today, by over 3 million people worldwide, especially 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.

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).

It influenced the língua brasílica, a form of Old Tupi which was the most widely spoken language in Brazil until the 18th century.

It 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.

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

History

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).

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.

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.

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

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 Moorish Iberia, 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"), izquierda → esquerda ("left")

French: crochet → colchete ("crochet"), paletot → paletó ("jacket"), bâton → batom ("lipstick"), filet → filé or filete ("steak")

Italian: maccherone → macarrão ("pasta"), pilotto → piloto ("pilot"), carrozza → carroça ("carriage"), barracca → barraca ("barrack")

English: football → futebol, beef → bife ("steak"), revolver → revólver, flirt → flerte, stock → estoque , knock out → nocaute, folklore → folclore

Writing system

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.

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:

• 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.

• 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, however, yet to be defined.

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.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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