Portuguese language

• 1. Introduction

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  Portuguese carries roughly 267 million native speakers, making it the fifth-most spoken native language on earth and the most widely spoken language anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. It is official in nine countries scattered across four continents, from Portugal and Brazil to Angola, Mozambique, and Timor-Leste. A single language ties together a Brazilian city, an Angolan village, and an island off the coast of Indonesia where it survives in Holy Week prayers. How did a regional speech born in a wet corner of northwestern Iberia spread across five continents? Why do the words for a lost letter sound differ on opposite sides of the Atlantic? And how did this language reshape the writing of Vietnamese and lend its own name to the word for an orange in half a dozen tongues? The answers run through Roman soldiers, troubadour songbooks, a king's decree, and a transatlantic crossing in the year 1500.

• 2. The Sound Of A Lost Letter

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  In the northwestern periphery of the Roman Empire, the Vulgar Latin spoken in Gallaecia drifted away from its neighbors, partly because it sat so far from the imperial center. Its most diagnostic change was the loss of intervocalic l and n. Latin luna became lua, dolor became dor, and moneta became moeda, a shift not found in neighbouring varieties such as Spanish. When the elided consonant was n, it often nasalized the vowel left behind. That single process became the source of most of the language's distinctive nasal diphthongs, the hum that makes Portuguese instantly recognizable. The Latin endings produced plurals like cães, irmãos, and razões, for dog, brother, and reason. Doubled consonants simplified too, so caballu became cavalo and annu became ano, while initial clusters like cl-, fl-, and pl- turned into palatal sounds, giving chama, chuva, and chumbo. Portuguese still keeps one trait it shares with almost no Romance relative. It preserves the clitic mesoclisis, splitting a verb to insert the pronoun inside it, as in dar-te-ei, meaning I will give thee. Spoken Portuguese today carries one of the larger sound inventories among Romance languages, and that richness traces straight back to these early erosions.

• 3. Songbooks And A King's Decree

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  Between the 12th and 14th centuries, Galician-Portuguese served as the literary language of lyric poetry across the Iberian Peninsula, drawing on the troubadour tradition of southern France. Three major songbooks preserve that poetry. The Cancioneiro da Ajuda, dated to the late 13th century, is the oldest and holds mostly cantigas de amor. The Cancioneiro da Vaticana and the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional are 15th-century copies of earlier manuscripts filled with secular and satirical verse. The Cantiga da Ribeirinha, composed around 1189 or 1198 by Paio Soares de Taveirós, is regarded as one of the earliest known pieces of this medieval lyric. 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. In the late 13th century, King Denis of Portugal issued a decree making Portuguese the mandatory language of royal administration, replacing Latin in the chancery. Laws, forals, royal letters, and court records all had to be written in Portuguese. The historian Cleusa Teixeira de Sousa reads this as a strategy to strengthen the authority of the Portuguese crown. The earliest known use of the term português for the language dates to around 1430, in a dedicatory letter from Peter, Duke of Coimbra, to his brother King Duarte, where he writes eu lia em português, I read in Portuguese.

• 4. Grammar Books And A National Poem

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  Fernão de Oliveira published the first grammar of Portuguese in 1536, arguing for an orthography based on pronunciation. He is considered one of the first grammaticians of the language. João de Barros followed in 1540 with a grammar shaped by humanist principles, at times justifying spellings on Latin etymologies. That same Renaissance impulse pushed written Portuguese closer to Latin, reviving pseudo-etymological spellings like pharmacia, theatro, and rheumatismo. Some words that had naturally lost their intervocalic l and n were quietly restored to Latinate forms, so saíva drifted back toward saliva. Duarte Nunes de Leão extended the tradition with his Orthographia of 1576 and his Origem da Língua Portuguesa of 1606, the latter among the earliest works to document dialectal variation. Linguists generally mark the publication of Luís de Camões's epic Os Lusíadas in 1572 as the start of Modern Portuguese. Camões is regarded as Portugal's national poet, and his masterwork gave the modern language its founding monument. The lexicon those grammarians were trying to pin down had grown vast. An estimate based on the 2001 Houaiss Dictionary counts around 228,500 entries and 382,000 definitions, most of it descended, directly or through other Romance languages, from Latin.

• 5. Words From Conquerors And Trade

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  Around 500 Germanic words entered Portuguese after the Suebi and Visigoths conquered Roman Hispania in the 5th century. Many concern warfare, like espora for spur, estaca for stake, and guerra for war. Others touch the natural world, like gavião for hawk, or human feeling, like orgulho for pride. The Germanic imprint lingers in place names too, in Ermesinde, Esposende, and Resende, common across the old Suebi and Visigothic regions of northern Portugal and Galicia. Between the 9th and early 13th centuries, Portuguese took in some 400 to 600 words from Arabic under Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the initial article a or al, as in aldeia for village, alface for lettuce, armazém for warehouse, and azeite for olive oil. Starting in the 15th century, Portuguese maritime exploration carried back loanwords from Asia, like catana from the Japanese katana, chá from the Chinese chá, and canja from Malayalam. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Portugal's role in the Atlantic slave trade and its colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil brought words of African and Amerind origin. From Kimbundu came cafuné, a head caress, and caçula, the youngest child. From South America came batata from Taíno, pipoca for popcorn from Tupi, and tucano from Guarani. A steady stream of French and English borrowings followed, giving bife from beef, futebol from football, and batom from the French bâton.

• 6. A Sea And A New Continent

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  On the 22nd of April 1500, the territory now known as Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese Empire when the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived. The land already held Indigenous peoples speaking more than 1,175 languages, with the Tupi-Guarani family dominant along the coast, so Portuguese did not take hold at once. From 1549, Jesuit missionaries systematized several of these languages into grammars, among them Joseph of Anchieta's grammar of Old Tupi in 1595. The transatlantic slave trade then brought speakers of an estimated 200 to 300 African languages, who were prohibited from using their native tongues and adopted Portuguese under harsh, irregular conditions. The discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the 1690s drew a wave of migration from Portugal, strengthening the language in the colony's center-south. In 1757, the Marquis of Pombal prohibited the indigenous lingua francas and imposed Portuguese as the sole official language of administration and education. When the royal court moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, it brought the printing press to Brazil and reinforced European norms in the capital. After independence in 1822, a desire for a Brazilian language stirred among intellectuals. Romantic writers like José de Alencar pushed to fold indigenous and popular terms into written Brazilian Portuguese, while purist grammarians demanded European standards. From the mid-19th century, mass immigration of Italians, Germans, and Japanese left further marks, concentrated in the South and Southeast.

• 7. Galician And Its Closest Kin

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  The closest relative of Portuguese is Galician, spoken in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain. The two were a single dialect continuum through the Middle Ages, and mutual intelligibility between Galicians and Portuguese is still estimated at 85 percent. They began to diverge from their common base from around the 11th century, and by about 1250 Portuguese texts adopted the digraphs lh and nh in place of the Latin ll and nn. After the rise of the House of Aviz following the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, the political center of Portugal shifted south to Lisbon and Coimbra, and Galicia came to be treated as foreign territory. According to the UNESCO philologist Tapani Salminen, the very proximity of Portuguese protects Galician, whose core vocabulary and grammar sit noticeably closer to Portuguese than to Spanish. A living vestige of the old shared tongue survives in the variant called galego-português baixo-limiao, spoken in villages within the Gerês-Xurés biosphere reserve. The Fala language, known to its speakers as xalimés, is another descendant of Galician-Portuguese, spoken in the Spanish towns of Valverde del Fresno, Eljas, and San Martín de Trevejo in Extremadura. Portuguese shares with Galician and Fala grammatical features rare elsewhere, including the future subjunctive, the personal infinitive, and the synthetic pluperfect, as in eu estivera, meaning I had been.

• 8. A Language On Five Continents

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  Roughly 200 million people speak Portuguese in South America, 30 million in Africa, 15 million in Europe, 5 million in North America, and about 0.33 million across Asia and Oceania. The shape of that reach is uneven. In São Tomé and Príncipe, around 75 percent speak Portuguese natively and 99 percent in total, while in Guinea-Bissau only about 5 percent are native speakers though half the population uses it. The combined Lusophone area was estimated at 300 million people in January 2022. The language also seeded others far beyond its colonies. The Japanese-Portuguese dictionary Nippo Jisho of 1603 was the first dictionary of Japanese in a European language. The Annamite-Portuguese-Latin dictionary of Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651 introduced the modern orthography of Vietnamese, built on the spelling of 17th-century Portuguese. Because Portuguese merchants were presumably the first to bring the sweet orange to Europe, the fruit took their name in several languages, from Albanian portokall to Greek portokáli and Persian porteghal. On the 17th of July 1996, the Portuguese-speaking countries formed the Community of Portuguese Language Countries to promote political, cultural, and linguistic cooperation. UNESCO estimates that Portuguese is the fastest-growing European language after English, with its strongest potential for growth as an international language in southern Africa and South America.