Portuguese language

Future

Current status and importance

Linguistic demography

Classification and related languages

• Galician and Fala.
• Mirandese, Leonese, Asturian, Extremaduran and Cantabrian. Mirandese is the only recognised regional language spoken in Portugal.
• Spanish and calão.

Galician–Portuguese in Spain

Influence on other languages

Derived languages

Language structure

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

• Semivowels contrast with unstressed high vowels in verbal conjugation, as in rio and riu. Phonologists discuss whether their nature is vowel or consonant.
• In most of Brazil and Angola, the consonant hereafter denoted as is realized as a nasal palatal approximant, which nasalizes the vowel that precedes it:.
• proposes that Portuguese possesses labio-velar stops and as additional phonemes rather than sequences of a velar stop and.
• The consonant hereafter denoted as has a variety of realizations depending on dialect. In Europe, it is typically a uvular trill ; however, a pronunciation as a uvular fricative">uvular consonant">uvular fricative may be becoming dominant in urban areas. There is also a realization as a voiceless uvular fricative, and the original pronunciation as an alveolar trill also remains very common in various dialects. A common realization of the word-initial in the Lisbon accent is a voiced uvular fricative trill. In Brazil, can be velar, uvular, or glottal and may be voiceless unless between voiced sounds. It is usually pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative, a glottal fricative">glottal consonant">glottal fricative or voiceless uvular fricative. See also.
• and are normally, as in English. However, a number of dialects in northern Portugal pronounce and as apico-alveolar sibilants, as in the Romance languages of northern Iberia. Some very few northeastern Portugal dialects still maintain the medieval distinction between apical and laminal sibilants.
• As a phoneme, occurs only in loanwords, names, and interjections, with a dialectal tendency for speakers to substitute in in most dialects outside of Brazil However, is an allophone of before in a majority of Brazilian dialects. Similarly, is an allophone of in the same contexts.
• In northern and central Portugal, the voiced stops are usually lenited to fricatives,, and, respectively, except at the beginning of words or after nasal vowels. At the end of a phrase, due to final-obstruent devoicing, they may even be devoiced to,, and .
• In Brazil, many speakers further shift to in closed syllables, especially outside the southern region.
• Phonetically, Portuguese and French, are quite different from the other major Romance languages. It has been suggested that this stems from the ancient link to Celtic languages such as Welsh or Breton, with which it also shares a substantial number of cognates: there are 37 sounds in Portuguese, including vowels, consonants and diphthongs, most of which exist in today's Celtic languages.

  Orthography

Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990

Grammar

• The present perfect has an iterative sense unique to the Galician–Portuguese language group. It denotes an action or a series of actions that began in the past but expected to occur again in the future. For instance, the sentence Tenho tentado falar contigo would be translated to "I have been trying to talk to you", not "I have tried to talk to you." On the other hand, the correct translation of "Have you heard the latest news?" is not *Tens ouvido as últimas? but Ouviste as últimas? since no repetition is implied.
• Portuguese makes use of the future subjunctive mood, which developed from medieval West Iberian Romance. In modern Spanish and Galician, it has almost entirely fallen into disuse. The future subjunctive appears in dependent clauses that denote a condition that must be fulfilled in the future so that the independent clause will occur. English normally employs the present tense under the same circumstances:
• The personal infinitive can inflect according to its subject in person and number. It often shows who is expected to perform a certain action. É melhor voltares "It is better to go back", É melhor voltarmos "It is better to go back." Perhaps for that reason, infinitive clauses replace subjunctive clauses more often in Portuguese than in other Romance languages.

  Vocabulary

• warfare, such as espora 'spur', estaca, and guerra, from Gothic *spaúra, *stakka, and *wirro respectively;
• natural world, such as suino from *sweina, gavião from *gabilans, vaga from *vigan;
• human emotions, such as orgulho or orgulhoso from Old Germanic *urguol, and
• verbs like gravar from *graba or esmagar from Suebian *magōn or esfarrapar from *harpō.

Dialects, accents and varieties

Portugal

1. – Azores.
2. – Alentejo, with the Oliventine subdialect.
3. – Algarve.
4. – Districts of Braga and Viana do Castelo.
5. – Central Portugal.
6. – Central Portugal.
7. – Regions of Coimbra and Lisbon.
8. – Madeira.
9. – Regions of the district of Porto and parts of Aveiro.
10. – Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro.

Brazil

1. Caipira – Spoken in the states of São Paulo ; southern Minas Gerais, northern Paraná and southeastern Mato Grosso do Sul. Depending on the vision of what constitutes caipira, Triângulo Mineiro, border areas of Goiás and the remaining parts of Mato Grosso do Sul are included, and the frontier of caipira in Minas Gerais is expanded further northerly, though not reaching metropolitan Belo Horizonte. It is often said that caipira appeared by decreolization of the língua brasílica and the related língua geral paulista, then spoken in almost all of what is now São Paulo, a former lingua franca in most of the contemporary Centro-Sul of Brazil before the 18th century, brought by the bandeirantes, interior pioneers of Colonial Brazil, closely related to its northern counterpart Nheengatu, and that is why the dialect shows many general differences from other variants of the language. It has striking remarkable differences in comparison to other Brazilian dialects in phonology, prosody and grammar, often stigmatized as being strongly associated with a substandard variant, now mostly rural.
2. Cearense or Costa norte – is a dialect spoken more sharply in the states of Ceará and Piauí. The variant of Ceará includes fairly distinctive traits it shares with the one spoken in Piauí, though, such as distinctive regional phonology and vocabulary.
3. Baiano – Found in Bahia and border regions with Goiás and Tocantins. Similar to nordestino, it has a very characteristic syllable-timed rhythm and the greatest tendency to pronounce unstressed vowels as open-mid and.File:Br.pt.png|thumb|Variants and sociolects of Brazilian Portuguese
4. – A broad dialect with many variants spoken in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and neighboring eastern regions of Minas Gerais. Fluminense formed in these previously caipira-speaking areas due to the gradual influence of European migrants, causing many people to distance their speech from their original dialect and incorporate new terms. Fluminense is sometimes referred to as carioca, however carioca is a more specific term referring to the accent of the Greater Rio de Janeiro area by speakers with a fluminense dialect.
5. Gaúcho – in Rio Grande do Sul, similar to sulista. There are many distinct accents in Rio Grande do Sul, mainly due to the heavy influx of European immigrants of diverse origins who have settled in colonies throughout the state, and to the proximity to Spanish-speaking nations. The word gaúcho itself is a Spanish loanword into Portuguese, of obscure Indigenous Amerindian origins.
6. Mineiro – Minas Gerais. As with the fluminense area, its associated region was formerly a sparsely populated land where caipira was spoken, but the discovery of gold and gems made it the most prosperous Brazilian region, attracting Portuguese colonists, commoners from other parts of Brazil, and their African slaves. The south-southwestern, southeastern, and northern areas of the state each have fairly distinctive speech, actually approximating to caipira, fluminense, and baiano respectively. Belo Horizonte and the area surrounding it have a distinctive accent.
7. – more marked in the Sertão, where, in the 19th and 20th centuries and especially in the area including and surrounding the sertão of Pernambuco and southern Ceará, it could sound less comprehensible to speakers of other Portuguese dialects than Galician or Rioplatense Spanish, and nowadays less distinctive from other variants in the metropolitan cities along the coasts. It can be divided in two regional variants, one that includes the northern Maranhão and southern of Piauí, and other that goes from Ceará to Alagoas.
8. Nortista or amazofonia – Most of Amazon Basin states, i.e. Northern Brazil. Before the 20th century, most people from the nordestino area fleeing the droughts and their associated poverty settled here, so it has some similarities with the Portuguese dialect there spoken. The speech in and around the cities of Belém and Manaus has a more European flavor in phonology, prosody and grammar.
9. Paulistano – Variants spoken around Greater São Paulo in its maximum definition and more easterly areas of São Paulo state, as well as perhaps "educated speech" from anywhere in the state of São Paulo. Caipira is the hinterland sociolect of much of the Central-Southern half of Brazil, nowadays conservative only in the rural areas and associated with them, that has a historically low prestige in cities as Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, and until some years ago, in São Paulo itself. Sociolinguistics, or what by times is described as "linguistic prejudice", often correlated with classism, is a polemic topic in the entirety of the country since the times of Adoniran Barbosa. Also, the "Paulistano" accent was heavily influenced by the presence of immigrants in the city of São Paulo, especially the Italians.
10. Sertanejo – Center-Western states, and also much of Tocantins and Rondônia. It is closer to mineiro, caipira, nordestino or nortista depending on the location.
11. Sulista – The variants spoken in the areas between the northern regions of Rio Grande do Sul and southern regions of São Paulo state, encompassing most of southern Brazil. The city of Curitiba does have a fairly distinct accent as well, and a relative majority of speakers around and in Florianópolis also speak this variant. Speech of northern Paraná is closer to that of inland São Paulo.
12. Florianopolitano – Variants heavily influenced by European Portuguese spoken in Florianópolis city and much of its metropolitan area, Grande Florianópolis, said to be a continuum between those whose speech most resemble sulista dialects and those whose speech most resemble fluminense and European ones, called manezinho da ilha.
13. Carioca – Not a dialect, but sociolects of the fluminense variant spoken in an area roughly corresponding to Greater Rio de Janeiro. It appeared after locals came in contact with the Portuguese aristocracy amidst the Portuguese royal family fled in the early 19th century. There is actually a continuum between Vernacular countryside accents and the carioca sociolect, and the educated speech, so that not all people native to the state of Rio de Janeiro speak the said sociolect, but most carioca speakers will use the standard variant not influenced by it that is rather uniform around Brazil depending on context.
14. Brasiliense – used in Brasília and its metropolitan area. It is not considered a dialect, but more of a regional variant – often deemed to be closer to fluminense than the dialect commonly spoken in most of Goiás, sertanejo.
15. Arco do desflorestamento or serra amazônica – Known in its region as the "accent of the migrants", it has similarities with caipira, sertanejo and often sulista that make it differing from amazofonia. It is the most recent dialect, which appeared by the settlement of families from various other Brazilian regions attracted by the cheap land offer in recently deforested areas.
16. Recifense – used in Recife and its metropolitan area.
17. Amazônico Ocidental — used in the extreme Western Amazon region, namely: Southwestern Amazonas, including the region of Boca do Acre and throughout the State of Acre, which share important historical-cultural aspects, such as, once belonging to Peru-Bolivian Confederation, the First Amazon rubber cycle and Acre Time Zone, sociologically, is considered a homogenous region. Differing from the traditional Northern dialect, in which the phonetic realization of the "s" always has the sound of ch, in the Brazilian Western Amazon region, there will only be the sound of ch whose words the "s" are in the middle of the word, as examples; costa, festa or destino, as well as the one observed in dialect of the north coast. Within the Brazilian countryside, it is one of the few areas where the phonetic realization of "r" resembles those observed in the Carioca dialect, other examples where this phenomenon is observed: Brasília dialect and Belo Horizonte dialect.

Other countries and dependencies

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• – Damaense and Goês
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• – Riverense [Portuñol language|Dialetos Portugueses do Uruguai ]

Characterization and peculiarities

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