Portuguese Roots

Portuguese language - Português, Romance language that is spoken in Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese colonial and formerly colonial territories. Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain, is closely related to Portuguese.

Portuguese owes its importance—as the second Romance language (after Spanish) in terms of numbers of speakers—largely to its position as the language of Brazil, where in the early 21st century some 187 million people spoke it.

It is estimated that there are also some 8 million Portuguese speakers in Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe). Portuguese is also spoken by about 678,000 people in the United States, with large communities of speakers in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.



Brazilian Portuguese varies from European Portuguese in several respects, including several sound changes and some differences in verb conjugation and syntax; for example, object pronouns occur before the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, as in Spanish, but after the verb in standard Portuguese. Despite differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, Portuguese is often mutually intelligible with Spanish. Brazilian Portuguese differs from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal in several respects, in syntax as well as phonology and vocabulary, but many writers still use an academic metropolitan standard.

In 2008 the Portuguese parliament passed an act mandating the use of a standardized orthography based on Brazilian forms.