Portuguese language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portuguese
Português
Pronunciation [puɾtuˈɡeʃ] (European), [poɹtuˈɡes] (BP-caipira), [poχtuˈɡeʃ] (BP-carioca), [poɾtuˈɡes] (BP-paulistano), [pɔhtuˈɡes] (BP-nordestino)[1]
Spoken in Officially in Brazil, East Timor, Macau, Portugal and six countries in Africa.
Total speakers Native: ≈210 million [2][3]
Total:~240 million[4][5]
Ranking 6
Language family Indo-European

• Italic
  • Romance
    • Italo-Western
      • Western
        • Gallo-Iberian
          • Ibero-Romance
            • West-Iberian
              • Galician-Portuguese
                • Portuguese

Writing system Latin alphabet (Portuguese variant)
Official status
Official language in

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 Angola
 Brazil
 Cape Verde
 East Timor
 Equatorial Guinea
 Guinea-Bissau
 Macau
 Mozambique
 Portugal
 São Tomé and Príncipe

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Countries and territories with a significant percentage of speakers:
 Andorra
 Argentina
 Australia
 Bermuda
 Canada
 United States
 France
 Japan
 Jersey
 Luxembourg
 Paraguay
 South Africa
 Switzerland
 Uruguay
 Venezuela

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International organizations:
African Union
 European Union
 UNASUL
 Mercosur
OAS
CPLP
Latin Union

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Regulated by International Portuguese Language Institute; CPLP; Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazil); Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Classe de Letras (Portugal)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 pt
ISO 639-2 por
ISO 639-3 por
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Portuguese ( português (help·info) or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999) that spanned from Brazil in the Americas to Goa and other parts of India, Macau in China, Timor (north of Australia) and Angola in Africa. It was used as the exclusive lingua franca on the island of Sri Lanka for almost 350 years. During that time, many creole languages based on Portuguese also appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Today it is one of the world's major languages, ranked seventh according to number of native speakers (between 205 and 230 million). It is the language of about half of South America's population, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal's former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in nine countries (see the table on the right), also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in Macau and Tetum in East Timor. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, California and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada (especially Toronto).

In various aspects, the system of sounds in Portuguese is more similar to the phonologies of Catalan or French than, say, those of Spanish or Italian. Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes once called Portuguese "the sweet language",[6] Lope de Vega referred to it as "sweet" [7] while Brazilian writer Olavo Bilac poetically described it as a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela: "the last flower of Latium, wild and beautiful". Portuguese is also termed "the language of Camões", after one of Portugal's best known literary figures, Luís Vaz de Camões.

Geographic distribution