Short answers, pulled from the story.
Portuguese has approximately 267 million native speakers, making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world. It is the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere and the second-most spoken Romance language after Spanish.
Portuguese is the official language of nine countries: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea, and Timor-Leste. It is also co-official in Macau and Equatorial Guinea.
Portuguese evolved from dialects of Vulgar Latin spoken in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula. It belongs to the Ibero-Romance group and retains some Celtic phonology.
The Will of Afonso II of Portugal, dated 1214, is widely regarded as one of the earliest dated documents written entirely in Portuguese. It survives as three copies of the will of the third king of Portugal, drawn up during a period of ill health.
Portuguese arrived in Brazil on the 22nd of April 1500 with the fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. Because the region held Indigenous peoples speaking more than 1,175 languages, Portuguese did not become the majority language immediately.
European and Brazilian Portuguese are the two primary standardized varieties, differing in phonology, vocabulary, and sometimes grammar. European Portuguese is generally stress-timed with heavy vowel reduction, while Brazilian Portuguese is more syllable-timed with better-preserved unstressed vowels, yet the two remain broadly mutually intelligible.
Galician is the closest relative of Portuguese, and the two formed a single dialect continuum known as Galician-Portuguese during the Middle Ages. Mutual intelligibility between Galicians and Portuguese is estimated at 85 percent, and they began diverging from around the 11th century.