Portuguese (português) is an Iberian Romance language that originated in Portugal, which is now the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macao, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and 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 Macao in China. In that colonial period, many Portuguese creoles appeared all over 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.
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, which augmented the complexity of the language.
In March of 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language was founded in São Paulo, the city with the largest number of Portuguese speakers in the world.
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.
Portuguese also loaned 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 Tupi-Guarani-based Lingua Geral, a trade language widely used in Brazil until the 18th century.
Quốc ngữ, the modern orthography of Vietnamese, is based on 17th-century Portuguese orthography.
Portuguese is a member of the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. It is very similar to Galician, and somewhat less to Spanish. Its most distant relative among the Romance languages is Romanian.
More specifically, Portuguese is a member of the West Iberian subset of Romance, which also includes Spanish (Castillan) and the regional languages Galician, Asturo-Leonese, Aragonese, Ladino, Extremaduran, and dialects thereof. By most linguistic criteria, these languages are significantly closer to each other than to any other living language — including Catalan, the other major language of the Iberian Peninsula.
Speakers of the West Iberian languages generally claim that they are all mutually intelligible to some extent. It is certainly true that a speaker of any of them can learn to read any other just by practicing, without formal study of the grammar. Bilingualism is quite common along the internal language boundaries of this group.
Portuguese differs somewhat from Spanish in orthography, and even more in phonology, grammar and vocabulary:
Actually, many of the most obvious discrepancies in the lexicon are only due to different usage preferences. For example, Portuguese has in fact both cear (rare) and jantar (common), whereas Spanish has both cenar (common) and yantar (rare), all meaning "to dine".
It is also claimed that a Portuguese speaker can understand spoken Spanish better than the other way around. This alleged asymmetry could be due to the general reduction of unstressed vowels in Portuguese, compared to Spanish.
Galician, spoken mostly in Galicia (Northwest Spain), is actually closer to Portuguese (especially in its Medieval form) than to Spanish. The resemblance is masked in writing because Galician orthography follows the Spanish model.
Indeed, the question of whether Portuguese and Galician are separate languages or dialects of the same language has been hotly debated for decades, and is loaded with political and sociolinguistic implications. The controversy can be compared with that over Moldovan and Romanian or Occitan and Catalan.
Ladino is a nearly-extinct language that was spoken by Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. In some ways, it is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, because both retain characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance from which Spanish has diverged. Compare for example Ladino ainda ("still") with Portuguese ainda and to Spanish aún. Ladino, like Portuguese, also conserved many of the initial [f] sounds that mutated to [h] (and were eventually lost) in Spanish. For example, Ladino fija ("daughter") and favlar ("to speak") match Portuguese filha and falar, whereas Spanish has hija and hablar.
Another member of the West Iberian group is Asturo-Leonese, that comprises the dialects Asturian and Leonese (spoken in Northwest Spain, East of Galicia) and Mirandese (spoken in Northeast Portugal). It differs from Portuguese in several phonetic features, such as [ʎ] instead of [l] in word-initial positions (e.g., Portuguese língua ['lingwa] vs. Mirandese lhéngua ['ʎɛngwa]); preservation of invervocalic [l] and [n] from Vulgar Latin; and use of diphthongs in tonic position where Portuguese has vowels (e.g. Portuguese castelo [kas'tɛlu] vs. Mirandese castiélho [kas'tjɛʎu].
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):
On the other hand, Portuguese is phonetically closer to French and Catalan than to Spanish in some respects; such as the occurrence of nasalization, palatalization, diphthongization of low-mid stressed vowels, aspiration of /f/, devoicing of sibilants, and change of intervocalic [ʎ] to [ʒ] — all features that are not shared by Spanish. The same can be said of the basic vocabularies: compare e.g. Portuguese bom ("good") with French or Catalan bon and Spanish bueno; or Portuguese filha with French fille, Catalan filla, and Spanish hija.
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.
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 Macao S.A.R. of China (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.
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 too major, though the sheer number of BP speakers has lead 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.
Phrase- and sentence-level stress and tone patterns and differ significantly between dialects: south-central European Portuguese dialects are often described as a stress-timed dialects (consistent with the loss of pre-stress vowels), while most Brazilian Portuguese dialects are syllable-timed.
EP dialects are divided into two major groups: northern and south-central dialects. The northern are distinguished by a more conservative and complicated series of fricatives. The dialects of Azores and Madeira in one hand, Brazil, Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe in the other hand have developed separate unique features, but have much in common with the south-central group. BP dialects are divided into a northern and southern groups, where the northern dialects tend to slightly more open pre-stressed vowels.
Though geographically specific vocabulary are common, they are not always completely consistent.
Portuguese is written using the Latin alphabet with 26 letters. However, K, W and Y are used only for proper names and vernacular derivatives thereof, like darwinismo ("Darwinism"), or metric units and symbols, like watt and km. It uses ç and acute, grave, circumflex and tilde accents over vowels, and (in Brazil) diaeresis on U.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Portuguese language".
last update April 28th, 2006