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The Portuguese language is one of the Iberian Romance languages that belongs to the Indo-European family. It is often nicknamed “The Last Flower of Latium,” “The Language of Camões,” and “The Sweet Language by Cervantes.” Portuguese originated in Northern Portugal, which was then Roman Gallaecia. It is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It is also the secondary official language of Tetum in East Timor and Chinese S.A.R. of Macau. In South Africa, more than 50% of its population speaks Portuguese, and it is the primary lingua franca in Africa. It was during the 15th and 16th century when Portugal created a vast commercial and colonial empire in many countries in the world and introduced the Portuguese language in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Today, Portuguese is spoken by about 187 million people in South America, 17 million in Africa, 12 million in Europe, two million in North America, and more than 600,000 in Asia. It ranks sixth in the world as the language with the most number of native speakers. Portuguese is pluricentric. Its two known groups of dialects are Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Several Portuguese creoles also exist in some parts of the world including Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Almost 90% of the language’s vocabulary was derived from Latin. It adopted several loaned words from different languages in the world when the Moors occupied the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal participated in the Age of Discovery in the Middle Ages. Portuguese consists of 19 consonants, nine oral vowels, five nasal vowels (which are regarded as oral vowel allophones by some linguists), 10 oral diphthongs, and five nasal diphthongs. Its written language uses the Latin alphabet and many symbols including the acute accent, grave accent, tilde, and the cedilla to denote various sound changes. Portuguese grammar has many similarities with the other Romance languages like its use of grammatical genders, copular verbs, and verb conjugations, while its use of the future subjunctive, synthetic pluperfect, and personal infinitive makes it grammatically different from them. |
