Portuguese Language

I  INTRODUCTION 

Portuguese Language, one of the Romance languages, which developed from Latin, and the official language of Portugal as well as of former Portuguese colonies and territories, including Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Princípe. Portuguese also is spoken in Goa (now part of India) and Macao (now part of China) and is one of two official languages in East Timor. With about 191 million speakers, Portuguese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.


Portuguese resembles Spanish more than it does any of the other Romance tongues. Like Spanish, it contains a very large number of words of Arabic origin, and like other modern languages, its vocabulary contains also a great many words of French and Greek origin. A very small number of words are derived from Carthaginian, Celtic, and Phoenician.

The majority of Portuguese speakers, about 158 million, live in Brazil, but over time Brazilian Portuguese has diverged from the Portuguese spoken on the European continent. Technically, Brazilian Portuguese is considered a dialect of European, or continental, Portuguese. Some differences between the two occur in vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, and spelling.

II  CHARACTERISTICS 

Portuguese retains many grammatical forms no longer found in other members of the Romance language group. The future subjunctive and future perfect subjunctive, for example, remain in use. As in Old Spanish, the endings of the future and the conditional in modern Portuguese may be detached from the stem to permit the interpolation of the object pronoun. Portuguese is the only Romance language with a personal or inflected infinitive. For example, partir (“to depart”) may be conjugated partir eu, meaning “for me to depart” or “that I may depart.” In addition to the compound pluperfect, Portuguese has also a simple one developed from the Latin pluperfect; thus the pluperfect of amara means “I had loved” in addition to the conventional “I would love.” Portuguese closely parallels Spanish in its grammar. A great number of nouns have the distinctive endings of a for the feminine form and o for the masculine form, corresponding to Latin nouns of the first and second declensions, respectively. The sign of the plural in Portuguese is regularly s.

The Portuguese language has proved of particular interest to linguists because of the complexity of its phonetic structure. The language contains 11 distinct vowel sounds, and a great difference in pronunciation exists between closed and open a, e, and o. (A closed vowel is pronounced with the tongue as high in the mouth as possible, as in the English words treat and toot. An open vowel, by contrast, places the tongue low in the mouth, as in hat or heart.) All five vowels may be nasalized—that is, pronounced by lowering the soft palate (back part of the roof of the mouth) so that air flows through the nose. The nasalization is indicated by a tilde (˜) placed over the vowel, or by an m or n placed after it. The language also contains a number of diphthongs (two vowels pronounced together, as in rail), several of which may be nasalized.

Phonetic analysis of Portuguese reveals 25 separate consonant sounds, which have almost the same value as in other Romance languages, with some variation from region to region. Sounds corresponding to English ch and dj do not exist in Portugal but are found in Brazil represented by the letters ti and di. The combination lh corresponds to Spanish ll and Italian gl; lh is pronounced as l in Portugal and as y in Brazil. Nh (pronounced like the ny in canyon) corresponds to Spanish ñ and Italian gn. The letters ch (corresponding to the sound ch in chateau) and j (corresponding to the sound of the second g in garage) are pronounced as in French.

The dental character of the consonants d, t, n, and l is more pronounced in Portuguese than in English, because in Portuguese pronunciation the tongue tends to touch the base of the upper teeth. The linking together in spoken Portuguese of syntactically related words in a sentence accounts for the variation in the sound of a number of consonants. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the case of the sibilant consonants s and z. One of the most distinctive features of Portuguese, compared with other Romance languages, is the loss of the so-called intervocalic l and n, which appear between vowels in Latin. Thus, the Latin word coelum (“sky”) becomes ceu in Portuguese and the Latin persona (“person”) becomes pessoa. The Portuguese forms of the definite article o, a (“the”) are due to the intervocalic position of the l in such syntactical combinations as de-lo and de-la (“of the”), from which have resulted the contracted forms do and da, and by a redivision of the compound, d'o and d'a. A word ending in l in the singular loses the l in the plural due to its intervocalic position. Thus, the singular of “sun” is sol, but the plural is sóis.

III  HISTORY 

Like all other languages of the group, Portuguese is a direct modern descendant of Latin, the vernacular Latin of the Roman soldier and colonist rather than the classical Latin of the cultured Roman citizen. Portuguese developed along the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula, in what is now northern Portugal and the province of Galicia, in northwestern Spain. This early form of the language, known as Galician Portuguese, then spread throughout the rest of Portugal. Galician continues to be spoken in Galicia and northern Portugal.

The Portuguese language reached Brazil with the arrival of Portuguese settlers in the 1500s. Over time, differences have developed between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. These differences stem in part from Brazilian contact with Native American languages and with African languages that reached Brazil as a result of the slave trade. At the same time, European Portuguese adopted changes as a result of contact with continental languages, especially with French during the 18th century. European and Brazilian Portuguese grew further apart during the 19th and 20th centuries as each language adopted its own words for new technologies.

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