Portuguese Language

Author:shah jahan bugti

History of portuguese

Portuguese language, Portuguese, Português, Romance language that is spoken in Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese colonial and in the past colonial territories. Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain, is closely related to Portuguese. Portuguese is a Romance language that developed over 2,000 years ago, in the third century BCE, when the Romans appeared at the Iberian Peninsula, a European peninsula mainly comprised of modern-day Portugal and Spain. In 216 BCE, Roman soldiers arrived speaking Vulgar Latin, also called colloquial Latin, which is the form of spoken Latin from which all Romance languages changed. The Romans weren’t alone in their inspiration on Portuguese. During the collapse of the Roman Empire between 409 CE and 711 CE, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic tribes, who both brought their languages to the region and adopted some of the Vulgar Latin dialects and culture. The Moorish invasion of 711 CE also influenced both Spanish and Portuguese. Today, modern Portuguese has between 400 and 800 words of Arabic origin. In 1143, Portugal was recognized as an independent kingdom. In 1290, the king of Portugal, Denis, created the first university in Lisbon and declared that the spoken language of Vulgar Latin be used and that it should be called Portuguese. Modern Portuguese evolved from Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese, which is now two distinct languages: Galician and Portuguese. Even though they are two separate languages, Galician and Portuguese are similar, with some speakers describing the difference between them as similar to the difference between American and British English.

• Number of People speaking Portuguese language:

Portuguese is an official language in 10 countries and territories, including Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. During the period of Portuguese colonialism of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese language was brought to many regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Local officials and Europeans of all nationalities used Portuguese as a lingua franca (a common language) to facilitate communication. Portuguese was also used by Roman Catholic missionaries in Asia, and today there is a cultural presence of Portuguese in parts of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. 

Portuguese is estimated to have 232 million native speakers and about 258 million speakers in total. It’s the ninth most spoken language in the world, and the second most spoken Romance language, after Spanish.

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. In Portugal, the language’s country of origin, there are more than 10 million speakers. 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.

• Difference in Brazil’s and European Portuguese:

Brazilian Portuguese differs from European Portuguese in several ways, 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 repeatedly mutually understandable with Spanish. There are 4 main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: 

(1) Central, or Beira, 

(2) Southern (Estremenho), including Lisbon, Alentejan, and Algarve, 

(3) Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores, 

(4) Brazilian. Standard Portuguese was developed in the 16th century, basically from the dialects spoken from Lisbon to Coimbra.

 Brazilian (Brasileiro) fluctuates 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. A Judeo-Portuguese is attested in 18th-century Amsterdam and Livorno (Leghorn, Italy), but practically no trace of that dialect remains today.

  Grammar and pronunciations of Portuguese:

Typical of the Portuguese sound system is the use of nasal vowels, indicated in the orthography by m or n following the vowel (e.g., sim ‘yes,’ bem ‘well’) or by the use of a tilde (∼) over the vowel (mão ‘hand,’ nação ‘nation’). In grammar its verb system is quite different from that of Spanish. Portuguese has a conjugated or personal infinitive and a future subjunctive and uses the verb ter (Latin tenere, Spanish tener ‘to have,’ ‘to hold’) as an auxiliary verb instead of haver (Latin habere, Spanish haber ‘to have’; in Spanish used only as an auxiliary verb).

Until the 15th century, Portuguese and Galician shaped one single linguistic unit, Gallego-Portuguese. The first evidence for the language consists of scattered words in 9th–12th-century Latin texts; continuous documents date from approximately 1192, the date assigned to an surviving property agreement between the children of a well-to-do family from the Minho River valley.

Literature began to bloomed especially during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the soft Gallego-Portuguese tongue was preferred by courtly lyric poets throughout the Iberian Peninsula except in the Catalan area. In the 16th century, Portugal’s golden age, Galician and Portuguese grew beyond separately, with the merging of the standard Portuguese language. From the 16th to the 18th century, Galician was used only as a home language (i.e., as a means of communication within the family). Toward the end of the 18th century, it was revitalized as a language of culture. In the 21st century, with Spanish, it is an official language of the comunidad autónoma (“autonomous community”) of Galicia. In 2008 the Portuguese parliament passed an act mandating the use of a standardized orthography based on Brazilian forms.

• Words, letters, and alphabets:

The Portuguese alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and comprises 26 letters of which 5 are vowels and 21 are consonants. The letters K, Y, and W are only used for loanwords, meaning that only 18 consonant letters are, in fact, used to write Portuguese words. 

Bibliography

Babbel Magazine. (2021, april 30). Portugese Language. (Y. Yates, Ed.) How many People speak portugese language. Retrieved from https://www.babbel.com

Britanicca. (n.d.). Portugese language. Portugese Language. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com

Portugesopedia. (2022). The Portugese Alphabets. (P. C, Ed.) The Portugese Alphabets. Retrieved from https://www.portuguesepedia.com