Learn Portuguese

Called "the sweet language" by the author Miguel de Cervantes, and more recently described by the Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac as "the last flower of Latium, wild and beautiful", Portuguese is today one of the major world languages, ranked seventh among the world's languages in number of native speakers (over 200 million).

Portuguese is the language with the most speakers in South America (186 million, over 51% of the continent's population), and a major lingua franca in Africa. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th century as Portugal set up a vast colonial and commercial empire (1415-1999), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macau in China. During the colonial period, Portuguese creoles appeared in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and other parts of the world.

Portuguese and Spanish are the two fastest-growing western languages. Following estimates by UNESCO, Portuguese is the language with the highest potential of growth as an international communication language in southern Africa and South America.

Portuguese Language History

The earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language are administrative documents of the 9th century, still interspersed with many Latin phrases in what is today known as Proto-Portuguese (between the 9th and the 12th century). The Kingdom of Leon first formally recognized Portugal as an independent nation in 1143, with Afonso Henriques as king. Between the 12th and 14th centuries - Portuguese gradually came into general use in Portugal. Previously it had been the language of preference for lyric poetry in Christian Iberia, much like Occitan was the language of the poetry of the troubadours. King Denis created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) in 1290, and decreed that Portuguese (then simply called the "Vulgar language") should be known as the Portuguese language and used officially.

During the second period of Old Portuguese, from the 14th to the 16th century, the language was distributed to many regions of Asia, Africa and the Americas and Portuguese had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa by the 16th century. Through mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people, and by its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, the language spread quickly. It continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century.

The beginnings of Modern Portuguese, which spans from the 16th century to today, can be characterized by an accumulation in the number of scholarly words borrowed from Classical Latin and Greek during the Renaissance, which served to enrich the lexicon.

Portuguese Language Facts

In March of 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language, was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, the city with the largest number of Portuguese speakers in the world.

Portuguese has two prominent dialects; Brazil and Old World (European) Portuguese. The dialects of Africa and Asia are generally closer to those of the old world rather than the Brazilian dialects.

Portuguese is a member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages.

Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet for its written script. It makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla, to denote vowel height, stress and nasalization. Brazilian Portuguese uses the diaeresis mark.

Visit the below pages for information on learning Portuguese in Portugal or Brazil.

The content of this page is original and is copyright of Languages in Action. It has been researched and adapted from several respected sources of Portuguese language information such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language.