Portuguese: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Portuguese is a Romance language: it grew out of the Latin spoken in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula after the Romans conquered it. There, in the Middle Ages, a language took shape that scholars call Galician-Portuguese — the common ancestor of today’s Portuguese and of Galician, still spoken just north of the Portuguese border in Spain.

Galician-Portuguese was a prestigious language of poetry. Even King Alfonso X of Castile, who promoted Castilian for prose, wrote his famous songs to the Virgin Mary, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, in Galician-Portuguese rather than in his own language.

When Portugal became an independent kingdom in the twelfth century while Galicia stayed with Castile, the two halves slowly drifted apart, and the south of the new country, taken from Arabic-speaking rulers, added a layer of Arabic words.

A short history

Around 1300, under King Dinis, Portuguese replaced Latin in the documents of the royal court. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Portuguese sailors explored the coasts of Africa, reached India by sea and arrived in Brazil in 1500. The language travelled with them: Portuguese merchants reached Japan in the 1540s, and the Japanese word for bread, «pan», still comes from pão.

In 1572 Luís de Camões published Os Lusíadas, the great epic about these voyages, which still holds a place in Portuguese culture something like Shakespeare’s in English.

Brazil became independent in 1822 and kept Portuguese. With its huge population it now has by far the most speakers, and Brazilian music, television and books carry its form of the language around the world. In Africa, Portuguese became the official language of Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe after independence in the 1970s.

Where it is spoken today

Portuguese is official in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Equatorial Guinea, and in Macau alongside Chinese. There are large Portuguese-speaking communities in France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere.

The two big varieties are European and Brazilian Portuguese. They share one grammar and understand each other, but you will hear the difference at once: European Portuguese swallows many unstressed vowels and sounds more clipped, Brazilian Portuguese keeps its vowels open and sounds more sung.

Grammar and vocabulary differ in places too. In Portugal you say estou a falar, in Brazil estou falando; Brazilians use você for almost everybody, while in Portugal friends say tu. Some everyday words change completely: train, bus and breakfast are comboio, autocarro and pequeno-almoço in Portugal but trem, ônibus and café da manhã in Brazil.

How Portuguese is written

Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet with several marks. The tilde on ã and õ marks a nasal vowel, as in pão and mãe; the acute and the circumflex show stress and the quality of a vowel; the grave on à marks the merging of two words, a + a; and the cedilla gives ç an s sound.

For most of the twentieth century Portugal and Brazil spelled a number of words differently. An agreement signed in 1990 brought them closer: Portugal dropped consonants that were no longer pronounced, so acção became ação and óptimo became ótimo, and the letters k, w and y officially joined the alphabet.

Differences remain where pronunciation differs: a fact is facto in Portugal, where the c is still heard, and fato in Brazil, and «economic» is económico on one side of the Atlantic and econômico on the other.

Words it gave and words it took

Arabic left many words, often still beginning with a- or al-: o azeiteolive oilo arrozricea alfacelettuce Oxalá, «hopefully», comes from an Arabic phrase meaning «if God wills».

In Brazil Portuguese met Tupi and other indigenous languages and took hundreds of words for plants, animals and places, such as o abacaxi, a pineapple, and o jacaré, a caiman. Some reached English through Portuguese: «jaguar», «piranha» and «cashew», from caju.

English also took words straight from Portuguese: «marmalade» from marmelada, a quince paste; «molasses» from melaço; «fetish» from feitiço, a charm; and «veranda», which came by way of India. Today many new words come from English, often in a Portuguese spelling: o futebol, o clube, o bife, from «beef».

What tends to surprise English speakers

Portuguese has two verbs for «to be», ser for what something is and estar for how or where it is now. Small words melt together: de + o is do, em + a is na, por + o is pelo.

Two pieces of grammar exist in hardly any other major language. The infinitive can take personal endings — para nós sabermos, «for us to know» — and there is a future subjunctive in everyday use: quando tiveres tempo, «when you have time».

The nasal sounds of pão, mãe and não take some practice, because English has nothing quite like them.

And watch the false friends — the first one is written on many doors: puxarto pullesquisitostrangepretenderto intendos parentesrelatives