Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European language family originating from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is spoken chiefly in Portugal, in Brazil, and in several African countries, as well as by immigrants in North America, Europe, and South America. With approximately 267 million speakers, it is listed as the fifth-most spoken native language.
Portuguese-speaking people or nations are known as Lusophone. As a result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese speakers is also found around the world. Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has retained some Celtic phonology.
Portuguese language structure reflects both its Latin roots and centuries of outside influences. These are seen in phonology, orthography, grammar, and vocabulary. Phonologically, Portuguese has a rich system of nasal vowels, complex consonant variations, and different types of guttural R - as well as other sounds in its European and Brazilian varieties. Its spelling, based similarly to English on the Latin alphabet, is largely phonemic but is influenced by etymology and tradition. Recent spelling reforms have attempted to create a unified spelling for the Portuguese language across all countries that use it. Portuguese grammar retains many Latin verb forms, and possesses several unique features. Its vocabulary is derived largely from Latin, but also includes from Celtic, Germanic, Arabic, African, Amerindian, and Asian languages, resulting from historical contact based on wars, trade, and colonization.
There is significant variation in the dialects of Portuguese worldwide, with two primary standardized varieties: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, each one having numerous regional accents and subdialects. African and Asian varieties generally follow the European written standard, though these will often display different phonological, lexical, and sometimes even syntactic features. While there is broad mutual intelligibility among the assorted lusophone population, variation may be observed in speech patterns, vocabulary, or grammar.
History
Origins
When the Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 216 BC, they brought with them the Latin language, from which all Romance languages are descended. The language was spread by Roman commoners, merchants, and soldiers, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous Celtic civilizations established long before the Roman arrivals. For that reason, the language has kept a relevant substratum of much older, Atlantic European Megalithic Culture and Celtic culture, part of the Hispano-Celtic group of ancient languages. In Latin, the Portuguese language is known as lusitana or lusitanica, after the Lusitanians, a pre-Celtic tribe that lived in the territory of present-day Portugal and Spain that adopted the Latin language as Roman settlers moved in. This is also the origin of the luso- prefix, seen in terms like "Lusophone".Germanic Period
Between AD 409 and AD 711, as the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic peoples of the Migration Period. The occupiers, most notably Suebi but also Visigoths and Buri originally spoke Germanic languages. Quickly, they adopted late Roman culture and the Vulgar Latin dialects of the peninsula and over the next 300 years totally integrated into the local population. Some Germanic words from that period are part of the Portuguese lexicon, together with place names, surnames, and first names.After the Arab Conquest
With the Umayyad conquest beginning in 711, Arabic became the administrative and common language in the conquered regions, but most of the remaining Christian population continued to speak a form of Ibero-Romance called Mozarabic which introduced a few hundred words from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Berber. Like other Neo-Latin and European languages, Portuguese has adopted a significant number of loanwords from Greek, mainly in technical and scientific terminology. These borrowings occurred via Latin, and later during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.Portuguese evolved from the medieval language spoken in the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia, which the County of Portugal once formed part of. This variety has been retrospectively named Galician–Portuguese, Old Portuguese, or Old Galician by linguists. It is in Latin administrative documents of the 9th century that written Galician–Portuguese words and phrases are first recorded. This phase is known as Proto-Portuguese, which lasted from the 9th century until the 12th-century independence of the County of Portugal from the Kingdom of León, which had by then assumed reign over Galicia.
In the first part of the Galician–Portuguese period, the language was increasingly used for documents and other written forms. For some time, it was the language of preference for lyric poetry in Christian Hispania, much as Occitan was the language of the poetry of the troubadours in France. The Occitan digraphs lh and nh, used in its classical orthography, were adopted by the orthography of Portuguese, presumably by Gerald of Braga, a monk from Moissac, who became bishop of Braga in Portugal in 1047, playing a major role in modernizing written Portuguese using classical Occitan norms. Portugal became an independent kingdom in 1139, under King Afonso I of Portugal. In 1290, King Denis of Portugal created the first Portuguese university in Lisbon and decreed for Portuguese, then simply called the "common language", to be known as the Portuguese language and used officially.
In the second period of Old Portuguese, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the Portuguese discoveries, the language was taken to many regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By the mid-16th century, Portuguese had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. The Portuguese expanded across South America, across Africa to the Pacific Ocean, taking their language with them.
Its spread was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people and by its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, which led to the formation of creole languages such as that called Kristang in many parts of Asia. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.
The end of the Old Portuguese period was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans the period from the 16th century to the present day, were characterized by an increase in the number of learned words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek because of the Renaissance, which greatly enriched the lexicon. Most literate Portuguese speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing, and eventually speech, in Portuguese.
Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes once called Portuguese "the sweet and gracious language", while the Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac described it as a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela. Portuguese is also termed "the language of Camões", after Luís Vaz de Camões, one of the greatest literary figures in the Portuguese language and author of the Portuguese epic poem The Lusiads.
In March 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language, was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, the city with the greatest number of Portuguese language speakers in the world. The museum is the first of its kind in the world. In 2015 the museum was partially destroyed in a fire, but restored and reopened in 2020.
Geographic distribution
Portuguese is spoken by approximately 200 million people in South America, 30 million in Africa, 15 million in Europe, 5 million in North America and 0.33 million in Asia and Oceania. It is the native language of the vast majority of the people in Portugal, Brazil and São Tomé and Príncipe. Around 45% of the population of urban Angola speaks Portuguese natively, with approximately 85% fluent; these rates are lower in the countryside. Just over 50% of the population of Mozambique are native speakers of Portuguese, and 70% are fluent, according to the 2007 census. Portuguese is also spoken natively by 30% of the population in Guinea-Bissau, and a Portuguese-based creole is understood by all. Almost 50% of the East Timorese are fluent in Portuguese. No data is available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, and the monolingual population speaks the Portuguese-based Cape Verdean Creole. Portuguese is mentioned in the Constitution of South Africa as one of the languages spoken by communities within the country for which the Pan South African Language Board was charged with promoting and ensuring respect.There are also significant Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities in many territories including Andorra, Bermuda, Canada, France, Japan, Jersey, Luxembourg, Namibia, Paraguay, Switzerland, Venezuela, and the United States.
In some parts of former Portuguese India, namely Goa and Daman and Diu, the language is still spoken by about 10,000 people. In 2014, an estimated 1,500 students were learning Portuguese in Goa. Approximately 2% of the people of Macau, China are fluent speakers of Portuguese. Additionally, the language is being very actively studied in the Chinese school system right up to the doctorate level. The Kristang people in Malaysia speak Kristang, a Portuguese-Malay creole; however, the Portuguese language itself is not widely spoken in the country.