Portuguese Language

Portuguese Language, one of the Romance languages, which belong to the sub-group of Italic languages from the Indo-European family. Like all other languages of the group, Portuguese is a direct modern descendant of Latin, the vernacular Latin of the Roman soldier and colonist rather than the classical Latin of the cultured Roman citizen. It developed in ancient Gallaecia (modern Galicia, in north-western Spain) and in northern Portugal, when it was called Galician-Portuguese, and then spread throughout present-day Portugal. Portuguese resembles Spanish more than it does any of the other Romance tongues, and the two languages are sometimes mutually intelligible despite differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. Like Spanish, it contains a very large number of words of Arabic origin, and like other modern languages, its vocabulary contains also a great many words of French and Greek origin. A very small number of words are derived from Carthaginian, Celtic, and Phoenician. Standard Portuguese is based on the dialect of Lisbon and is spoken in Portugal, where it is the official language. It is spoken in 33 other countries, including Brazil; several islands in the Atlantic Ocean; Angola, Mozambique, and other former colonies in Africa and Asia; and parts of Indonesia. It holds official status in many of these places and, with around 192 million speakers worldwide, is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Portuguese is the official (and national) language of Brazil, the country with the highest number of Portuguese speakers in the world (around 163 million). Technically, it is a dialect of Portuguese (called Brazilian Portuguese as opposed to European, or continental, Portuguese) with some differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, and orthography. However, as the two varieties differ greatly, some linguists suggest they may be separate languages. The differences are in some part due to the contact with different languages that the two varieties have had, European Portuguese mainly with other European languages and Brazilian Portuguese mainly with Native American and African (from the slave trade) languages. Galician, spoken in Galicia and areas of Portugal, is a language in the same subset of languages (Portuguese-Galician) as is Portuguese and is closer to Portuguese than it is to Spanish. Fala, the language that completes the Portuguese-Galician subset, is spoken by minorities in Extremadura, Spain, and on the Portuguese border. It is said to be intelligible with Galician. There are several Portuguese-based creole languages around the world, including Kabuverdianu, which is spoken in the Cape Verde Islands and some other countries, and Upper Guinea Crioulo, used in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, the Gambia, and the United States.

Portuguese retains many grammatical forms no longer found in other members of the Romance language group. The future subjunctive and future perfect subjunctive, for example, remain in use. As in Old Spanish, the endings of the future and the conditional in modern Portuguese may be detached from the stem to permit the interpolation of the object pronoun. Portuguese is the only Romance language with a personal or inflected infinitive. For example, partir (“to depart”) may be conjugated partir eu, “for me to depart” or “that I may depart”. In addition to the compound pluperfect, Portuguese also has a simple one developed from the Latin pluperfect; thus the pluperfect of amara means “I had loved” in addition to the conventional “I would love”. Portuguese closely parallels Spanish in its grammar. A great number of nouns have the distinctive endings of a for the feminine form and o for the masculine form, corresponding to Latin nouns of the first and second declensions, respectively. The sign of the plural in Portuguese is regularly s.

The Portuguese language has proved of particular interest to linguists because of the complexity of its phonetic structure. The language contains 11 distinct vowel sounds, and a great difference in pronunciation exists between closed and open a, e, and o. All five vowels may be nasalized, although with less complete stoppage of the nasal passages than in French. The nasalization is indicated by a tilde placed over the vowel, or by an m or n placed after it. The language also contains a number of diphthongs, several of which may be nasalized.

Phonetic analysis of Portuguese reveals 25 separate consonantal sounds, which have almost the same value as in other Romance languages, with some variation from region to region. The most important variations are that rr is generally alveolar in Portugal and frequently uvular or guttural in Brazil, and that sounds corresponding to English ch and dj do not exist in Portugal but are found in Brazil represented by ti and di. Lh corresponds to Spanish ll and Italian gl. Nh corresponds to Spanish ñ and Italian gn. Ch and j are pronounced as in French.

The dental character of the consonants d, t, n, and l is more pronounced in Portuguese than in English, because in Portuguese pronunciation the tongue tends to touch the base of the upper teeth. The linking together in spoken Portuguese of syntactically related words in a sentence accounts for the variation in the sound of a number of consonants. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the case of the sibilant consonants s and z. One of the most distinctive features of Portuguese, compared with other Romance languages, is the loss of the so-called intervocalic l and n. Thus, quais represents the Latin quales and pessoa the Latin persona. The Portuguese forms of the definite article o, a (“the”) are due to the intervocalic position of the l in such syntactical combinations as de-lo and de-la (“of the”), from which have resulted the contracted forms do and da, and by a redivision of the compound, d'o and d'a. A word ending in l in the singular loses the l in the plural due to its intervocalic position. Thus, the singular of “sun” is sol, but the plural is sóis.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.