Portuguese orthography
Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.
The spelling of Portuguese is largely phonemic, but some phonemes can be spelled in more than one way. In ambiguous cases, the correct spelling is determined through a combination of etymology with morphology and tradition; so there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters or digraphs. Knowing the main inflectional paradigms of Portuguese and being acquainted with the orthography of other Western European languages can be helpful.
A full list of sounds, diphthongs, and their main spellings is given at Portuguese phonology. This article addresses the less trivial details of the spelling of Portuguese as well as other issues of orthography, such as accentuation.
Letter names and pronunciations
Only the most frequent sounds appear below since a listing of all cases and exceptions would become cumbersome. Portuguese is a pluricentric language, and pronunciation of some of the letters differs. Apart from those variations, the pronunciation of most consonants is fairly straightforward.Although many letters have more than one pronunciation, their phonetic value is often predictable from their position within a word; that is normally the case for the consonants. Since only five letters are available to write the fourteen vowel sounds of Portuguese, vowels have a more complex orthography, but even then, pronunciation is somewhat predictable. Knowing the main inflectional paradigms of Portuguese can help.
In the following table and in the remainder of this article, the phrase "at the end of a syllable" can be understood as "before a consonant, or at the end of a word". For the letter r, "at the start of a syllable " means "at the beginning of a word or after l, n, s, or a prefix ending in a consonant". For letters with more than one common pronunciation, their most common phonetic values are given on the left side of the semicolon; sounds after it occur only in a limited number of positions within a word. Sounds separated by "~" are allophones or dialectal variants.
The names of the letters are masculine.
Digraphs
Portuguese uses digraphs, pairs of letters which represent a single sound different from the sum of their components. Digraphs are not included in the alphabet.The digraphs and, before and, may represent both plain or labialised sounds, but they are always labialised before and . The trema used to be employed to explicitly indicate labialized sounds before and , but since its elimination, such words have to be memorised. Pronunciation divergences mean some of these words may be spelled differently. The digraph is pronounced as an English by the overwhelming majority of speakers. The digraphs and, of Occitan origin, denote palatal consonants that do not exist in English. The digraphs and are used only between vowels. The pronunciation of the digraph varies with dialect
Diacritics
Portuguese makes use of five diacritics: the cedilla, acute accent, circumflex accent, tilde, and grave accent . Its major use was on adverbial formations: Só->Sòmente, Última->Ùltimamente. Formerly the diaeresis was also used.The cedilla indicates that ç is pronounced . By convention, s is written instead of etymological ç at the beginning of words, as in "São", the hypocoristic form of the female name "Conceição".
The acute accent and the circumflex accent indicate that a vowel is stressed and the quality of the accented vowel and, more precisely, its height: á, é, and ó are low vowels ; â, ê, and ô are high vowels. They also distinguish a few homographs: por "by" with pôr "to put", pode " can" with pôde " could".
The tilde marks nasal vowels before glides such as in cãibra and nação, at the end of words, before final -s, and in some compounds: romãzeira "pomegranate tree", from romã "pomegranate", and vãmente "vainly", from vã "vain". It usually coincides with the stressed vowel unless there is an acute or circumflex accent elsewhere in the word or if the word is compound: órgão "organ", irmã + -zinha = irmãzinha "little sister". The form õ is used only in the plurals of nouns ending in -ão and in the second person singular and third person forms of the verb pôr in the present tense.
- The graphemes â, ê, ô and é typically represent oral vowels, but before m or n followed by another consonant, the vowels represented are nasal. Elsewhere, nasal vowels are indicated with a tilde.
- Sometimes à and ò are used in other contraction forms, e.g.: cò and cà. and coa/ca. Other examples of its use are: prà, pràs and prò, pròs. According to the orthographic rules of 1990, these forms should be spelled without the grave accent.
- Until the spelling reforms of 1971 and 1973, the grave accent was also used to denote accents in words with so-called irregular stress after some changes. namely adverbs formed with the -mente affix and nouns with affixes that start with z'' like -zinho or -zão, as well as in some other cases of indication of slightly accented or yet unaccented vowels, all of the vowels can take the grave accent mark, e.g.: provà'velmente, cafèzinho, analìticamente, lògicamente, ùnicamente. The main pattern is to change the acute accent mark, if it graphically exists in any part of the word before the affixation to the grave one, e.g.: in penultimate syllable: notá'vel › notàvelmente; in ultimate syllable: jacaré › jacarèzão, and so on. The circumflex accent mark did not change: simultâneo/a › simultâneamente.
- From 1911 to 1945, exclusively in Portugal and its colonies, the grave accent was also used to distinguish a pair of words that had different pronunciations in their unstressed vowels, like pregar and prègar, or molhado and mòlhado. Although even in its time, this use was rare and restricted to è'' and ò only. Some grammatists still denote unstressed and as è and ò respectively, but this accentuation is not provided by the current orthographical standards.
Stress
Below are the general rules for the use of the acute accent and the circumflex in Portuguese. Primary stress may fall on any of the three final syllables of a word. A word is called oxytone if it is stressed on its last syllable, paroxytone if stress falls on the syllable before the last, and proparoxytone if stress falls on the third syllable from the end. Most multisyllabic words are stressed on the penult.All words stressed on the antepenult take an accent mark. Words with two or more syllables, stressed on their last syllable, are not accented if they have any ending other than -a, -e, -o, -am, -em, -ens; except to indicate hiatus as in açaí. With these endings paroxytonic words must then be accented to differentiate them from oxytonic words, as in amável, lápis, órgão.
Monosyllables
Monosyllables are typically not accented, but those whose last vowel is a, e, or o, possibly followed by final -s, -m or -ns, may require an accent mark.- The verb pôr is accented to distinguish it from the preposition por.
- Third-person plural forms of the verbs ter and vir, têm and vêm are accented to be distinguished from third-person singulars of the same verbs, tem, vem. Other monosyllables ending in -em are not accented.
- Monosyllables ending in -o with the vowel pronounced or in -e with the vowel pronounced or are not accented. Otherwise, they are accented.
- Monosyllables containing only the vowel a take an acute accent except for the contractions of the preposition a with the article a, which take the grave accent, à, and for the following clitic articles, pronouns, prepositions, or contractions, which are not accented : a, da, la, lha, ma, na, ta. Most of those words have a masculine equivalent ending in -o, also not accented: o, do, lo, lho, mo, no, to.
Polysyllables
- The endings -a, -e, -o, -am, -em, -ens are unstressed. The stressed vowel of words with such endings is assumed to be the first one before the ending itself: bonita, bonitas, gente, viveram, seria, serias, seriam. If the word happens to be stressed elsewhere, it requires an accent mark: será, serás, até, séria, sérias, Inácio, Amazônia/''Amazónia. The endings -em and -ens take the acute accent when stressed, except in third-person plural forms of verbs derived from ter and vir, which take the circumflex. Words with other endings are regarded as oxytone by default: viver, jardim, vivi, bambu, pensais, pensei, pensou, pensão. They require an accent when they are stressed on a syllable other than their last: táxi, fácil, amáveis, râguebi.
- Rising diphthongs containing stressed i or stressed u are accented so they will not be pronounced as falling diphthongs. Exceptions are those whose stressed vowel forms a syllable with a letter other than s. Thus, raí'zes, incluído, saía and saíste are accented, but raiz, sairmos and saiu''' are not.
- The stressed diphthongs ei, eu, oi take an acute accent on the first vowel whenever it is low.
- Aside from those cases, there are a few more words that take an accent, usually to disambiguate frequent homographs such as pode and pôde. In European Portuguese, a distinction is made in the first person plural of verbs in -ar, between the present tense ending -amos and the preterite -ámos. As these are pronounced identically in Brazilian Portuguese, this accent is not used.