Since being proclaimed in November 1999, by UNESCO, it has been celebrated every year since the year 2000, on February 21^st.

This date aims to promote, preserve and protect all languages spoken by people around the world. It is estimated that there are more than 6000 languages across the globe. However, nearly 43% of them are at risk of disappearing. To give you an idea, this means that about every two weeks an entire language disappears taking with it cultural heritage, diversity and memory. So it is important to recognize this.

Regarding my own mother language, I can’t really say which one it is as I learnt “two plus one” at roughly the same time. Both my parents spoke to me in their mother languages since the day I was born – English and Portuguese, so I consider them both as my mother language. The “plus one” is Dutch which I picked up through nursery and the telly as a baby/toddler.

Seeing as part of my own heritage is on the endangered list, one of my personal goals is too learn how to speak Irish one day. I have taken the first step this year to accomplish that and have joined a Gaeilge course online. But that’s another story.

In honour of today’s celebration here are some facts and aspects about the Portuguese Language.

A Língua Portuguesa | The Portuguese Language

The roots of the Portuguese language are in Galicia

Portuguese – Português or Língua Portuguesa (Portuguese language) – is a Western Romance language originating in the Iberian Peninsula. More specifically in Galicia and the county of Portugal known as “O Condado Portucalense” or sometimes “Portugalia” in some documents.

Main features of the language include:

• stressed and suppressed vowels.
• It has an abundance in nasal sounds indicated by the letters “n”, “m” and the tilde sign ~ .
• Portuguese has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, and two grammatical numbers, singular and plural.
• There are differences in levels of formality when addressing others.
• sentence tone level is very important as it indicates the mood and intention of the speaker like a question for example.
• Verbs have many, many inflections – over 50 forms in fact.
• Multiple negatives. – “I won’t buy nothing, nowhere.” Instead of “I won’t buy anything, anywhere.”
• There are two verbs “to be” with a third often translating into “to be” in English – the verb “ficar” (to stay/to remain). Click here for more information.
• The typical word order is subject/verb/object, but it’s not as strict as in English.

Present Perfect – A unique feature in the Portuguese language

A unique feature of Portuguese is its present perfect tense. It points to an action or multiple actions, starting in the past tense and will most likely continue in the future. For example:

“temos ido lá todos os dias.” will translate more accurately as “we have been going there every day (and will continue to do so)” instead of “we’ve gone there everyday.”

Also the following sentence “Have you seen the film?” won’t be translated into “Tens visto o filme?” but will translate correctly to “Viste o filme?” meaning “you saw the film?” (present simple) since watching a film is (usually) implying a one off action. IF it were a series though, you could. Since that implies repetition: “Tens visto a serie?” = “Have you been watching/seeing the series?”.

Portuguese is the sole official language of seven different countries:

Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe. And it has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea and Macau. With approximately 227 million native speakers world wide, spoken across 5 continents. It is the 6^th most spoken language in the world. However, only 5% of these reside in Portugal.

It’s the fastest-growing European language after English

UNESCO has estimated that Portuguese is the fastest-growing European language after English and that it has the highest potential for growth as an international language in southern Africa and South America.

Arabic influence in the language

Although the Portuguese lexicon is 90% derived from Latin, its Arabic influences come from the Moorish occupation which started in 711 and lasted until the end of the 15th century.

The Moors where mainly indigenous Maghrebine Berbers, that converted to Islam through contact with Arabs from the Middle East. Following that, they went on to occupy the Iberian peninsula.

Even though they were an invasive force, they were the scientific pioneers of the era, and introduced many new technologies and techniques as well as new vocabulary to describe these new things into the local cultures. These new words were adapted into Portuguese and still exist today. Most of them are easy to identify as they begin with the letters “al” like “Algarve”, others are trickier to recognize, such as “açúcar” (sugar), “cenoura” (carrot) and “xadrez” (chess).

Other international influences in the language are due to Portugal’s active role during the Age of Discovery.

Portuguese only had 23 letters up to 2009

Before 2009, the letters “K,” “W,” and “Y” were not part of the Portuguese alphabet. All words up to then with these letters in them were either of foreign words or foreign proper nouns. And international words like “kilo” used to be spelled “quilo” instead. But a new “Orthographic Agreement” was signed among all Portuguese speaking countries to standardized spelling forms across different variations of Portuguese and introduced the letters “K,” “W,” and “Y.”

European and Brazilian Portuguese are not as similar as people might think

The difference is often compared to the difference between American and British English, but the reality is Portuguese and Brazilian are considerable more different by comparison.

One of the key differences is the use of the second person pronoun – the informal “Tu” . In Portugal, “Tu” is commonly used, but in Brazil it’s less commonly heard as they favour third person pronouns such as “você”. But more on personal pronouns another day.

The syntax, grammar and vocabulary are different too. To my knowledge, Brazilian does not have any suppressed vowels or syllables at all. It is also syllable timed, not stress timed like European Portuguese. This makes its pronunciation and rhythm very different as the duration of every syllable is equal in Brazilian and it is not the case in European Portuguese. Please watch my reading series and my pronunciation rules video on Youtube where I demonstrate this.

One other key difference in terms of grammar is that Brazilian places object and reflexive pronouns in front of verbs more similarly to Spanish, for example:

“te amo” instead of “amo-te” (I love you) or “o tenho” instead of “tenho-o” (I have it).

Another interesting difference about Brazilian Portuguese speakers is they never seem to use “este”, “esta” or “isto” (masculine this, feminine this, this), everything is either “esse, “essa” or “isso” (masculine that, feminine that, that).

The Portuguese comedian Ricardo Araújo Pereira, once gave a wonderful example of a perfectly normal sentence in Brazilian Portuguese, that European Portuguese speakers would never understand, even though they are using perfectly normal Portuguese words:

Brazilian Portuguese

“estou parado no acostamento porque a minha perúa não tem estepe”

First lets look at what this literally means in European Portuguese:

“I’m stopped at the shoulder/support/coasting because my turkey hen doesn’t have a steppe/savana.”

What the sentence actually means:

“I’m stopped on the side of the road because my van doesn’t have a spare tire”

How it should be said in European Portuguese:

“estou parado na berma porque a minha carrinha não tem pneu sobresselente”.

Quite different isn’t it? He goes on to say that a European Portuguese speaker will know Portuguese is being spoken but will have no clue what’s being said. And this is so true. The first time I heard that, I had no idea what it meant before he “translated” it to European Portuguese.

Does that mean you need to avoid Brazilian?

That depends on how much Portuguese you already know and how often you use it. AND if you’re learning European Portuguese. If you are a beginner then I would say yes, avoid, because of what I stated above. The pronunciation is too different and you’ll be confused when the European Portuguese is spoken to you. It’s the same the other way around. If you’re a beginner of Brazilian Portuguese, I would not recommend starting through European Portuguese.

But If you’re an intermediate or advanced speaker, then no, not at all. You know enough Portuguese to tell the difference and it shouldn’t influence your speaking at this point (unless you move to Brazil of course).

Again, this really depends on how much you actively speak Portuguese in your daily life.

Spanish and Portuguese are they near identical?

In short, yes. However there are important differences too. They share roughly 89% of vocabulary but it’s the pronunciation and different sounds that separate them. Spanish has has 24 phonemes, whereas European Portuguese has 37. (here are 32 of them)

Another main difference is Spanish is also syllable timed like Brazilian and it too places object pronouns in front to the verbs:

“lo tengo” (I have it in Spanish) vs “tenho-o” (I have it in Portuguese)

These last two differences make it that many times Brazilians will understand certain Spanish dialects quicker than they would European Portuguese. How funny is that?

There also are many cognates (false friends) that do not mean the same thing and can lead to embarrassing situations. There is also vastly different vocabulary for things:

Portuguese	Spanish	English
faca	cuchillo	knife
óculos	gaffa	glasses (for eyes)
joelho	rodilla	knee

Interestingly, the continuous tense in Spanish is closer to Brazilian Portuguese than European Portuguese by it’s wide use of the gerund.

Spanish also exclusively uses the verb “haver” as an auxiliary verb whilst Portuguese uses “ter” instead. Knowing Spanish can help you with learning Portuguese but it can hinder too and you may end up speaking a version of “Portuñol” or “Spantuguese” in English

Let me know your thoughts and experiences you’ve had with the Portuguese language!