Portuguese Language
History
The Portuguese language is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It is also one of the official languages of East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau in China. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 260 million total speakers, Portuguese is usually listed as the sixth most natively spoken language in the world, the third-most spoken European language in terms of native speakers, and a major language of the Southern Hemisphere.
Origins
The Romance languages, including Portuguese, are descendants of Vulgar Latin, which was the everyday language of the Roman Empire. The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. The language began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century.
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. With its origin in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, it has kept a special relationship with Galician, its close relative.
Geographic distribution
Portuguese is the mother tongue of about 200 million people and the second language of millions more. The Portuguese-speaking countries are scattered all over the world. Portuguese is spoken in Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe.
Dialects
There are many varieties of Portuguese, which can be grouped into two main categories: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. There are also many other dialects spoken in Portuguese-speaking countries, each with its own unique characteristics.
Phonology
The phonology of Portuguese varies among dialects, but the standard system is based on the European Portuguese of Lisbon. Portuguese has a rich phonetic inventory, which includes nasal vowels, a number of different diphthongs, and a variety of consonant clusters.
Grammar
The grammar of Portuguese is similar to the grammars of other Romance languages, especially Spanish and Italian. Portuguese, like other Romance languages, has a grammar that is somewhat different from that of English. It is a null-subject language with a verb-subject-object word order and it uses inflections to indicate mood, tense, aspect, and voice.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Portuguese includes a large number of loanwords from other languages, particularly from Latin, Greek, and Arabic. The language also has a significant number of Brazilianisms, words of indigenous American origin, and Africanisms, words of African origin.
Writing system
Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet, supplemented by the use of diacritical marks. The Portuguese alphabet is essentially the same as the English one, with the addition of three accented letters used in native words and a number of foreign letters used in loanwords.
See Also
