About Portuguese Language

Due to the extraordinary maritime explorations of Vasco da Gama, Magellan and other great travellers, Portuguese has spread all from Portugal all over the world and is now one of the world's great languages, spoken mainly in Portugal and Brazil. Although written Portuguese bears many similarities to Spanish (according to Spanish speakers, especially, many of whom do not want to learn Portuguese and expect Portuguese speakers to understand their Spanish), spoken Portuguese sounds very different and much attention needs to be given to pronunciation. The efforts should prove worthwhile as learners discover the joys of the world's most beautiful language.

Who speaks it?

Portugal, the Azores (Portuguese islands), Madeira (Portuguese islands), Macao (China), Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé Príncipe, East Timor (East Indies), Cape Verde (Africa), Brazil, Goa and Daman and Diu (India).

How many People?

200 million.

Which alphabet?

Roman.

Where did it come from?

Romance language developed from spread of Latin, i.e. Roman occupation of Iberian Peninsula. Some Arabic influence from Muslim rule (8th century).

Past

Portuguese belongs to the Romance group of languages.
The Romance languages evolved from Latin as a result of the military victories of the Romans and their subsequent political and cultural domination. Latin then came to replace the native languages in the Iberian peninsula (with exception of Basque). In the following centuries, the area was invaded and controlled by many different tribes such as the Visigoths and the Moors from North Africa in the eighth century.
This was when the Portuguese language began to emerge and a large number of Arabic words were absorbed into the vocabulary - such words betray their origin by the prefix al which is the Arabic definite article.
(Algarve is derived from the Arabic al-gharb meaning 'western land').
Finally, in the eleventh century, Portugal recognised Portuguese as her national language.

Present

Today Portuguese is spoken in four continents.
Is the official language of seven independent countries, boasts over 150 million speakers.
In Europe, it is the third most popular language, and is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world.

The Language

Phonetically, Portuguese is an extremely rich language.
It has a great range of vocalic or vowel sounds including nasal equivalents for most of them.
(Nasal vowels are indicated by a tilde (~) or are followed by m or n and can be great fun to learn).
Portuguese grammar follows fairly similar patterns to those of other Latin languages, for example Spanish.
In its written form Portuguese is reasonably similar to Spanish, however the pronunciation is quite different.
Accents in Portuguese are important since many words have the same spelling but the inclusion of an accent can give an entirely different meaning,
for example e means 'and', whereas é means 'is'.
If a Portuguese word which includes the letters k, w or y, they are foreign or borrowed words and are generally used in bars or bistros - 'whisky' for example.

Portuguese/Brazilian

There are two acknowledged varieties of Portuguese: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
The differences between are due to the geographical, social and political differences between the two regions.
Unlike the rest of South America which was under the control of the Spanish, Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and independence was finally declared in 1822.
The differences between Brazilian and Portuguese are similar to those between British and American English.
Brazilians tend to use be less formal about their grammar and when addressing one another (você instead of o senhor) and their intonation is a lot more musical.
However, whichever dialect you learn, you will probably find regional differences within each country cause more confusion than the differences between the two coutries.