The Spanish and French languages are the most well known Romance languages. Portuguese is often the forgotten Romance language and yet it is the third most significant Romance language and the fifth most spoken language in the world.
There are over 200 million people who speak Portuguese in the world. It spread internationally during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, with the creation of the Portuguese Empire. Portuguese, developed from the Vulgar Latin brought to the Iberian Peninsula by Roman conquerors and was distinguishable from Latin by the 11th cent.
The Portuguese language spoken in Lisbon and Coimbra ultimately gave rise to the Standard Portuguese known today. Portuguese vocabulary is overwhelming derived from Latin, but does include a number of Arabic, French, and Italian words, as well as words from indigenous South American and African languages.
Portuguese is a member of the Italic subfamily which in turn is part of the Indo-European family of languages. It is presently the main language spoken in Portugal, Brasil, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Green Cape, Santo Tomé and Príncipe, Oriental Timor, Ecuatorial Guinea, t is also spoken in Macao and in some areas of India that former Portuguese colonies including the regions of Goa, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
Minority groups also speak it in neighboring regions near Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay due to the migration of Brazilians largely involved in commercial activities.
Portuguese speaking countries are members of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, an organization founded in 1996. The Portuguese language spoken in Portugal differs slightly from the Portuguese spoken in Brazil in areas of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.
A distinctive phonetic feature of the Portuguese language is the nasalization of certain vowels and diphthongs, which can be indicated by a tilde placed above the appropriate vowel. The acute and diacritic accents serve to clarify stress and pronunciation as well as to distinguish homonyms.
The grave accent guides the speaker in pronunciation. It can also indicate a contraction, as in às, which is a combination of a "to" and as "the" (feminine plural). A c with a cedilla (ç) is pronounced like c in English place when used before the vowels a, o, and u.
Like Spanish, Portuguese has two forms of the verb "to be" : ser, which denotes a comparatively permanent state and which also precedes a predicate noun, and estar, which denotes a comparatively temporary condition.
Portuguese, like its Spanish counterpart, tends to use reflexive verbs instead of the passive voice.
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Jacob Lumbroso is a world traveler and an enthusiast for foreign languages, history, and foreign cultures. He writes articles on history and languages and recommends used Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese courses to learn various languages.
