Search Results - Português

Portuguese language

Portuguese ( or ) is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European language family originating from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is spoken chiefly in Brazil, Portugal, and several countries in Africa, 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 the 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 that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has kept some Celtic phonology.

Portuguese language structure reflects 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 and other sounds in European and Brazilian varieties. Its spelling, based like English on the Latin alphabet, is largely phonemic but is influenced by etymology and tradition. Recent spelling reforms attempted to create a unified spelling for the Portuguese language across all countries that use it. Portuguese grammar retains many Latin verb forms and has some unique features such as the future subjunctive and the personal infinitive. The vocabulary is derived mostly from Latin but also includes from Celtic, Germanic, Arabic, African, Amerindian, and Asian languages, resulting from historical contact including wars, trade, and colonization.

There is significant variation in 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 they often have different phonological, lexical, and sometimes syntactic features. While there is broad mutual intelligibility among varieties, variation is seen mostly in speech patterns and vocabulary, with some regional differences in grammar. Provided by Wikipedia