Portuguese phonology


The phonology of Portuguese varies among dialects, in extreme cases leading to some difficulties in mutual intelligibility. This article on phonology focuses on the pronunciations that are generally regarded as standard. Since Portuguese is a pluricentric language, and differences between European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Angolan Portuguese can be considerable, varieties are distinguished whenever necessary.

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Portuguese is fairly conservative. The medieval Galician-Portuguese system of seven sibilants is still distinguished in spelling, but is reduced to the four fricatives by the merger of into and apicoalveolar into either or , except in parts of northern Portugal. These changes are known as deaffrication. Other than this, there have been no other significant changes to the consonant phonemes since Old Portuguese. However, several consonant phonemes have special allophones at syllable boundaries, and a few also undergo allophonic changes at word boundaries.
Phonetic notes
  • Semivowels contrast with unstressed high vowels in verbal conjugation, as in rio 'I laugh' and riu 'he laughed.' Phonologists debate whether their nature is vocalic or consonantal. In intervocalic position semivowels are ambisyllabic, they are associated to both the previous syllable and the following syllable onset.
  • In Brazil and Angola, the consonant hereafter denoted as is realized as a nasal palatal approximant, which nasalizes the vowel that precedes it: ninho 'nest'.
  • is often the pronunciation of a sequence of followed by in a rising diphthong in Brazil, forming a minimal pair between sonha and Sônia ; menina, "girl".
  • is often the pronunciation of a sequence of followed by in a rising diphthong in Brazil; e.g. limão, "lemon" ; sandália, "sandal".
  • The consonant is velarized in all positions in European Portuguese, even before front vowels. In Portugal, the unvelarized lateral appears only in non-standard dialects.
  • The consonant hereafter denoted as has a variety of realizations depending on dialect. In Europe, it is typically a voiced uvular fricative. 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 Africa and Asia, the classical alveolar trill is still mostly dominant, due to separate development from European Portuguese. 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 voiceless glottal fricative or voiceless uvular fricative. See also Guttural R in Portuguese. All those variants are transcribed with in this article.
  • and are normally, as in English. However, a number of dialects in northern Portugal pronounce and as apico-alveolar sibilants which are exactly the same as the ones found in Catalan and Northern European Spanish. Those apico-alveolars sound like duller versions of and, but they are kept apart from which are laminal postalveolar. A small number of northeastern Portugal dialects still retain the medieval distinction between apical and laminal sibilants, a distinction also found in Mirandese and analogous to the distinción of European Spanish.
  • As phonemes, and occur only in assimilated or unassimilated loanwords, with a tendency for speakers to substitute into fricatives in Portugal. However, in most Brazilian dialects t and d are pronounced as and before,, consonants and at the end of words.
  • 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; a similar process occurs in Spanish.
  • In large parts of northern Portugal, e.g. Trás-os-Montes, and also in East Timor and the islands of Flores, and are merged, both pronounced, as in Spanish.
  • and are realized as and in all positions by a considerable quantity of dialects, especially before and. Because of this, it is mostly agreed upon that the alveolo-palatal fricatives are also valid descriptions of the and phonemes.

    Rhotics

The occurrence of the two rhotic phonemes and is mostly predictable by context, with dialectal variations in realization.
The rhotic is predicted to be "hard" in the following circumstances:
  • Syllable-initially when not following an oral vowel
  • Following a nasal vowel
  • Syllable-finally, in most Brazilian and some African dialects
The rhotic is predicted to be "soft" when it occurs in syllable onset clusters or, in some dialects, syllable-finally.
The rhotic phonemes and contrast only between an oral vowel and a vowel, similar to Spanish. In this context, they are spelled "rr" and "r", respectively.
This restricted variation has prompted several authors to postulate a single rhotic phoneme. and see the soft as the unmarked realization and that instances of intervocalic result from gemination and a subsequent deletion rule. Conversely, argue that the hard is the unmarked realization.

Brazilian rhotics

In addition to the phonemic variation between and between vowels, up to four allophones of the "merged" phoneme /R/ are found in other positions:
  1. A "soft" allophone in syllable-onset clusters, as described above;
  2. A default "hard" allophone in most other circumstances;
  3. In some dialects, a special allophone syllable-finally ;
  4. Commonly in all dialects, deletion of the rhotic word-finally.
The default hard allophone is some sort of voiceless fricative in most dialects, e.g.,, although other variants are also found. For example, an alveolar trill is found in certain conservative dialects down São Paulo, of Italian-speaking, Spanish-speaking, Arabic-speaking, or Slavic-speaking influence. A uvular trill is found in areas of German-speaking, French-speaking, and Portuguese-descended influence throughout coastal Brazil down Espírito Santo, most prominently Rio de Janeiro.
The syllable-final allophone shows the greatest variation:
  • Many dialects use the same voiceless fricative as in the default allophone. This may become voiced before a voiced consonant, esp. in its weaker variants.
  • The soft occurs for many speakers in Southern Brazil and São Paulo city.
  • An English-like approximant or vowel occurs elsewhere in São Paulo as well as Mato Grosso do Sul, southern Goiás, central and southern Mato Grosso and bordering regions of Minas Gerais, as well as in the urban areas in the Sinos river valley. This pronunciation is stereotypically associated with the rural "caipira" dialect.
Throughout Brazil, deletion of the word-final rhotic is common, regardless of the "normal" pronunciation of the syllable-final allophone. This pronunciation is particularly common in lower registers, although found in most registers in some areas, e.g., Northeast Brazil, and in the more formal and standard sociolect. It occurs especially in verbs, which always end in R in their infinitive form; in words other than verbs, the deletion is rarer and seems not to occur in monosyllabic non-verb words, such as mar. Evidence of this allophone is often encountered in writing that attempts to approximate the speech of communities with this pronunciation, e.g., the rhymes in the popular poetry of the Northeast and phonetic spellings in Jorge Amado's novels and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri's play Eles não usam black tie.
The soft realization is often maintained across word boundaries in close syntactic contexts.

Consonant phonotactics

Syllables have the maximal structure of CCVVCC. The majority of syllables are open, with CV syllables found to compose 60% of a corpus of Portuguese, followed by CVC and V. Syllables ending in a consonant generally end in one of the single consonants,,, : European Portuguese allows coda, and, and Brazilian Portuguese allows coda and . Syllables ending in two consonants are very rare, and involve a sibilant preceded by another consonant; examples include the first syllables of perspicaz and solstício.
Phonotactic rules concerning onset consonants:
  • The native Portuguese consonant clusters, where there is not epenthesis, are sequences of a non-sibilant oral consonant followed by the liquids or, and the complex consonants. Some examples: flagrante, complex'o, fixo , latex, qua'tro, guaxinim,
  • The consonants and occur word-initially only in a few borrowed words and in forms of the clitic pronoun lhe. They are almost always found in the middle of a word between vowels, and are rare before.
  • The semivowels and do not occur before and respectively.
  • Regarding Brazilian Portuguese, analyzes the phonetic clusters at the start of words like qual and guardar as separate phonemes, and, rather than as or followed by in phonemic sequence. This is because when or is combined with a different approximant or when is combined with a different initial consonant, the relevant approximant can always be alternatively realized as a full vowel in Brazilian Portuguese: quiabo, guiar, suar. However, this alternation can never apply to the phonetic clusters and : qual and guardar in Brazilian Portuguese are always and, never * or *.
Phonotactic rules concerning coda consonants:
  • Although nasal consonants do not normally occur at the end of syllables, syllable-final may be present in rare learned words, such as abdómen. In Brazilian varieties, these words have a nasal diphthong.
  • While the sibilant consonants contrast word-initially and intervocalically, they appear in complementary distribution in the syllable coda. For many dialects, the sibilant is a postalveolar in coda position. In many other dialects of Brazil, the postalveolar variant occurs in some or all cases when directly preceding a consonant, including across word boundaries, but not word-finally. In a number of Brazilian dialects, this "palatalization" is absent entirely. Voicing contrast is also neutralized, with or occurring before voiced consonants and or appearing before voiceless consonants and before a pause. In the vast majority of dialects, however, word-final "s" and "z" are pronounced /z/ before vowels. In European dialects, the postalveolar fricatives are only weakly fricated in the syllable coda.
  • In most Brazilian dialects, is vocalized to at the end of syllables, but in the dialects of the extreme south, mainly along the frontiers with other countries, it has the full pronunciation or the velarized pronunciation. In some caipira registers, there is a rhotacism of coda to retroflex. In casual BP, unstressed il can be realized as, as in fácil .
  • For speakers who realize as an alveolar trill, the sequence can coalesce into a voiced alveolar fricative trill.
  • The semivowels and only contrast in some diphthongs like in pai versus pau. Otherwise they are the non-syllabic allophones of and in unstressed syllables.