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So, where are you from?
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Oh, Brasil. Es verdad? Hablo español! Awe!
(Oh Brazil. Really? I speak Spanish.)
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Hello everyone. Welcome to the Langfocus channel.
My name is Paul.
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Today, I'm going to talk about Portuguese.
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Portuguese is a language that
far too often gets ignored.
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In Canada, if you tell someone you want
to study Portuguese,
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they might say "Oh. Isn't that kind of like Spanish?"
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Or worse yet, they might say: "Why Portuguese?
Why don't you study Spanish instead?"
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And I'm sure Portuguese-speakers just love that.
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The truth is that Portuguese is one of the world's
major languages with between 215 and 220 million people.
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It is the second most widely spoken
Romance language after Spanish.
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Like Spanish, it is so widely spoken because it spread
to the four corners of the globe during the colonial period.
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It is the only official language in Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique,
Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Saõ Tomé and Príncipe
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and it's co-official in East-Timor,
Equatorial Guinea and Macau.
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Like all romance languages, Portuguese developed
from Vulgar Latin
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which was the spoken Latin used during
the Roman Empire.
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Together with Castilian Spanish along with Galician
and a few other languages,
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it forms the Ibero-Romance
branch of the Romance language family.
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It's called the Ibero-Romance because
it's located on the Iberian Peninsula.
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When the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula,
Vulgar Latin began to be spoken there.
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And it started to diverge gradually over time
into different regional dialects.
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And by the 10th century, those dialects had diverged
enough to be considered separate languages.
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But Portuguese didn't exactly exist yet.
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Galician-Portuguese also known
as "Old Portuguese" existed.
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Galician-Portuguese diverged into two separate
modern languages : Galician and Portuguese
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by about the 16th century.
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Although they're still quite similar from what I hear.
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The language received its name "Portuguese" in the year 1290
when the King of Portugal opened the first university in Portugal.
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And he decided that the language of instruction would not
be Latin but would be the Vulgar Latin,
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the spoken language and he decided
to call that language "Português".
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Portugal was still a relatively new kingdom at that time
and the language had never been called Portuguese yet.
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It was just called "Vulgar Latin" and it was not yet
very distinct from the Vulgar Latin spoken in Galicia.
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In the 1500s, when the newly developed printing press
helped make Portuguese a standardized language,
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Portugal had already started exploring and colonizing
different areas of the world, bringing their language with them.
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The net result is this:
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Portuguese is spoken by around
ten million people in Portugal
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but it is much more dispersed around the world.
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It is spoken by 205 million people in Brazil
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And then, of course, there's Africa.
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In Angola, it is the native language of about
5 million people, 20 % percent of the population.
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But it's also widely used as a lingua franca
that unites the country's different ethnic groups.
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That is about 15 million more second language speakers.
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Cape Verde's 500,000 people speak
a Portuguese-based Creole as their native language
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but they learn Portuguese
as a second language for official purposes.
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Also in Guinea-Bissau,
the most common language is a Portuguese Creole
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but Portuguese is also an official language
with around 200,000 native speakers
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In Mozambique there are 1.9 million native speakers and
another 10 million who speak it as a second language.
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In Saõ Tomé and Príncipe, it is spoken
by another 120,000 people as a native language.
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In Equatorial Guinea, it was made an official language
in recent years though nobody really speaks it.
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I think they did that to promote their relations
with other Portuguese-speaking countries in the area.
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And let's not forget Asia.
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Portuguese is a co-official language in East-Timor,
which was a Portuguese colony until 1975.
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Nowadays, it is co-official language again
but mostly only older people can speak it
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and they are almost all second language speakers.
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Also in Macau, Portuguese is spoken by 0.6%
of the population as a native language
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and it's also spoken by some elderly people
as a second language but not so much these days.
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There are also the former Portuguese colonies in India,
specifically Goa, Daman y Diu.
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Portuguese is spoken by some people there
but the numbers are quite small these days
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There are also Portuguese Creoles spoken in Malacca (Malaysia),
Flores (Indonesia), Batticaloa (Sri Lanka) and Aruba.
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If we include the second language speakers, then there
are about 250 to 260 million speakers of Portuguese.
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That does not include the creole languages.
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Portuguese's the six most widely
spoken language in the world.
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And it is also the most widely spoken language in South America,
even though it's only spoken in one country there, Brazil.
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There are different accents and dialects of Portuguese
but the main 2 categories are:
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European Portuguese, which is spoken in Portugal
and Brazilian Portuguese, which is spoken in Brazil.
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Brazilian Portuguese is similar to 18th c. Portuguese
and also has some influences from
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the native languages and African languages
of the people who were present in Brazil.
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I've read a lot of comments by lots
of different people about this.
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But it seems like the difference between Brazilian
and European Portuguese is basically
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like the difference between UK English
versus American English.
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There is a different accent; different pronunciation;
there are some different vocabulary words and idioms;
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and some of the grammar is slightly different.
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But basically, they are the same language
and are (mutually) intelligible.
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Though sometimes depending on your exposure
to the other variety of the language,
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you might have
some trouble understanding or communicating.
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Which one is better to study?
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Well, most students of Portuguese seem to say
that Brazilian Portuguese is easier to learn.
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And, on top of that, Brazil has a huge population of
over 200 million people
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and you're much more
likely to meet Brazilians around the world,
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then you are Portuguese people, in my experience.
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On top of that, Brazilian soap operas
are very popular around the world
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and they make people in all Portuguese-speaking
countries quite familiar with Brazilian Portuguese.
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So, in my opinion, the best one to learn
is Brazilian Portuguese,
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unless you have a specific plan
to visit or live in Portugal.
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There might be some other reasons
I prefer Brazilian Portuguese
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but there's no need to get into that right now.
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Did you know... ?
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The Iberian Peninsula was under Islamic rule
for several hundred years and, during that time,
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Portugal absorbed some influence from the Arabic language
and that includes about 800 vocabulary words of Arabic origin.
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Something similar happened to Spanish too.
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There are also some Portuguese words that have made
their way into the English vocabulary.
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For example:
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Some food like:
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And the insect:
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Like most Romance languages, Portuguese has a lot of
vocabulary that is recognizable to English-speakers,
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Let's look at a Portuguese sentence
and I'll show you what I mean.
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Okay, forgive my pronunciation, you guys.
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So let's look at some of the words here.
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"Cantora". Well, that looks like the English word "Cantor"
which is someone who recites music
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in a synagogue or church, I think.
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So I think that "cantora" is a "singer".
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"Compositora". Well, that looks like composer.
So I think that means "musical composer".
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"Instrumentista". Well, I think that looks
like "instrumentalist" or "musician".
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And "produtora". That looks like producer
so "produtora musical" must mean "musical producer"
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And then, "atriz" that must mean "actress"
and "norte-americana" that looks like "North-American"
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So, if you look at all of those words and just kind
of analyze each word,
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you can figure out the meaning of
that sentence pretty easily.
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A lot of Portuguese sentences are like that
though they're not always that simple, but...
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I give you a simple example just to show you
that you can often recognize words like that.
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So you can probably learn to read some Portuguese
fairly easily if you're an English-speaker.
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And if you know another Romance language,
then you can probably already read a lot of it
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without having studied the language.
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Of course, learning to speak it and to write it
will require focus and effort because that means
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you have to actually produce the phonology and
produced the grammar as you have to do with any language.
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So, stop thinking of Portuguese
as the strange little brother of Spanish.
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It's actually an important global language
that stands on its own.
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Thank you for watching the Langfocus channel.
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If you are interested in Portuguese and in Brazil,
make sure you also check out my video on Brazil
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on my other channel Geofocus and it's right here
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Thank you for watching. And have a nice day!
