Brazil is a country located in South America, occupying the eastern part of this tropical continent. The official language of Brazil is Portuguese. The full original name of the language is língua portuguesa. This is the language of the Western Romance group, which is spoken by more than two hundred million people in South America and Europe. This article is dedicated to the official language of Brazil.
The language of Brazilians
What is the official language in Brazil? Brazilian Portuguese is a set of Portuguese dialects used primarily in Brazil. It is spoken by almost all 200 million inhabitants of the country. It is widespread in the Brazilian diaspora, which currently consists of about two million people who have emigrated to other countries.
This variety of Portuguese differs, especially in phonetics and word stress, from the varieties spoken in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries. In African countries, it tends to be more closely related to modern European Portuguese, partlybecause Portuguese colonial rule ended in them much later than in Brazil. Despite these differences between spoken varieties, Brazilian and European Portuguese differ little in formal writing. This phenomenon is in many ways similar to the differences between American and British English.
Portuguese language reform
In 1990, the community of Portuguese-speaking countries, which included representatives of all countries whose official language was Portuguese, reached an agreement on spelling reform in order to unify the two standards that were then used by Brazil, on the one hand, and the rest Portuguese-speaking countries - on the other. This spelling reform went into effect in Brazil on January 1, 2009. In Portugal, the reform was signed by the President on 21 July 2008 and included a six-year adaptation period during which both spellings coexisted. All countries of this community have signed the text of this document. In Brazil, this reform has been in effect since January 2016. Portugal and other Portuguese-speaking countries have also started using the new spelling.
Regional varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, while remaining mutually intelligible, may differ from each other in such matters as vowel pronunciation and speech intonation.
Features of Brazilian Portuguese
The question is often asked: what is the official language in Brazil? Insofar asThere is no Brazilian language, Brazilians speak their own version of Portuguese.
The use of Portuguese in Brazil is a legacy of the colonization of the Americas. The first wave of Portuguese-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil in the 16th century, but the language was not then widely used. For a time, the Portuguese coexisted with a lingua franca called lingua geral, based on the Indian languages used by the Jesuit missionaries, as well as various African languages spoken by the millions of slaves brought into the country between the 16th and 19th centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, Portuguese had established itself as the national language. One of the main factors contributing to this rapid change was the spread of colonization into the interior of Brazil and the increase in the number of Portuguese settlers who brought their language and became the most important ethnic group in Brazil.
From the early 18th century, the Portuguese government made efforts to expand the use of the Portuguese language throughout the colony. Especially because its use in Brazil could guarantee Portugal the lands claimed by the Spaniards (according to various treaties signed in the 18th century, these lands could be transferred to the people who actually occupied them). Under the leadership of the Marquis of Pombal (1750-1777), Portuguese began to be preferred by the Brazilians, as he expelled the Jesuit missionaries who taught the lingua geral and banneduse of other local dialects.
Failed attempts to colonize the city of Rio de Janeiro by the French in the 16th century and by the Dutch in the northeast of the country in the 17th century had little effect on Portuguese. Substantial waves of non-Portuguese-speaking settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (mostly from Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Japan, and Lebanon) were linguistically integrated into the Portuguese-speaking majority over several generations, with the exception of some regions from three southern states (Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul). What is the official language spoken in Brazil? Of course, this is Portuguese, which is spoken by 97 percent of the country's population.
Current position of the language
Currently, the vast majority of Brazilians speak Portuguese as their first language, with the exception of small island communities of descendants of European (German, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian) and Japanese immigrants - mainly in the south and southeast of the country, as well as villages and reservations inhabited by Native Americans. And even these population groups use the Portuguese language to communicate with strangers, watch and listen to television and radio programs in it. In addition, there is a community of Brazilian sign language users estimated to reach 3 million.
Where Portuguese is spoken
What language is spoken in Brazil? The official Brazilian language is Portuguese. Also Portuguese isthe only official language of Portugal, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola and Sao Tome and Principe. It also has the status of one of the official languages in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea and Macau in China. This article talks about the official state language of Brazil.
As a result of territorial expansion during the period of colonial conquest, Portuguese and mixed Creole speakers are found in Goa, Daman and Diu in India, in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka; on the Indonesian island of Flores; in the Malacca state of Malaysia, on the islands in the Caribbean, where Portuguese-based creoles are spoken. Cape Verdean Creole is the most widely known Portuguese Creole. It is customary to refer to Portuguese speakers as lusophones in English and Portuguese.
Influence
Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that developed from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval kingdom of Galicia and retained some of the phonetic and lexical features of the Celtic languages. This is a general description of the official language of Brazil.
Portuguese is the native language of approximately 215-220 million people. The total number of speakers is 260 million. This language is the sixth most spoken in the world, the third most common European and one of the main ones in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in South America and the second most spoken language in Latin America after Spanish. Is the official languageEuropean Union and African Union.
Portuguese is a fast growing language
According to UNESCO, Portuguese is the fastest growing European language after English. According to The Portugal News, which published the UNESCO figures, it has the highest growth potential as an international in southern Africa and South America. Portuguese is a global language officially spoken on five continents.
Since 1991, when Brazil joined the Mercosur economic community with other South American countries, namely Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, Portuguese has been either compulsory or taught in the schools of these South American countries.
At the start of the 21st century, after Macau was ceded to China and Brazilian immigration to Japan slowed, the use of Portuguese in Asia declined. It is once again becoming the language of opportunity there mainly due to the expansion of diplomatic and financial ties with the economically powerful Portuguese speaking countries (Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, etc.) in the world.
Number of speakers
The official language of Brazil, how many speakers does it have? In July 2017, the total number of Portuguese speakers is estimated at 279 million. This number does not include the Lusophone diaspora, which is estimated at about 10 million people (including 4.5 million Portuguese, 3 million Brazilians and half a million Creoles, etc.). It is difficult to give an official exact number of speakersPortuguese, since a significant proportion of these people are naturalized citizens born outside the territory of Brazil and Portugal, and immigrant children may have only a basic knowledge of the language. It is also important to note that a significant part of the diaspora is part of the already counted population of Portuguese-speaking countries and territories.
Therefore, the Portuguese language is used by more than 250 million people daily who have direct or indirect, legal and social contact with it. Portuguese can be the only language of communication, or is used only for certain purposes: for education, communication with local or international administration, for trade and the purchase of various services.
Portuguese Vocabulary
Most of the words in Portuguese come from Latin. Either it was a direct borrowing or Latin terms came through other Romance languages. However, due to its original Celtic heritage and then Portugal's involvement in the Age of Discovery, it has some Celtic words and borrowed vocabulary from all over the world.
The development of the Portuguese language in Brazil (and therefore in other areas where it is spoken) was influenced by other languages with which it came into contact, mainly in vocabulary: first the native Amerindian vernaculars, then various African, spoken by slaves, and finally the languages of later European and Asian immigrants. Although the vocabulary is still predominantly Portuguese, the influence of other languagesappears in the Brazilian lexicon, which today includes, for example:
- Hundreds of Tupi-Guaranese words referring to local flora and fauna. Although some of these words are more prevalent in Brazil, they are also used in Portugal and other countries where Portuguese is spoken.
- Multiple West African Yoruba words related to food, religious concepts and musical expressions.
- English terms from the fields of modern technology and trade.
- Arabic terms that entered the vocabulary during the period of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Island. They are common to Brazilians and Portuguese.
Words borrowed from the Tupi Indian language are especially common in toponyms (place names). Also, Portuguese adopted the names of most of the plants and animals found in Brazil in this language. Most official animal names in Portuguese-speaking countries are also Amerindian in origin. However, many Tupi-Guarani place names are not a direct consequence of Native American expressions, but were actually invented by European settlers and Jesuit missionaries, who widely used the lingua geral in the first centuries of colonization. Many of the American words entered the Portuguese lexicon as early as the 16th century, and some were eventually borrowed into other European languages.
From the ninth to the early thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese acquired almost 800 words fromArabic language under the influence of Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the original Arabic article "al". This category of words includes many general terms such as village, olive oil, hotel. Thus, the official language of Brazil contains many borrowings.
Languages of South America
In fact, two languages are used in South America - Spanish and Portuguese, which are closely related. Spanish does not have official status in Brazil. However, it is widely studied in schools and universities across the country. There is a close linguistic interaction. Thus, Portuguese is the only official language of Brazil. Venezuela and Peru use Spanish as their official language. The number of speakers of these languages in South America is approximately equal.
Unlike Spanish, Portuguese has preserved older speech forms on the one hand, and on the other hand contains a huge amount of sound innovations of indeterminate (most likely Celtic) origin. The set of vowel sounds, the specificity of the pronunciation of certain sounds, the change in open-closed vowels make it close to French and Catalan. However, the vocabulary of Portuguese, as well as the grammatical system, is closer to Spanish. At the same time, due to the specifics of the pronunciation of vowels, Portuguese speakers understand spoken Spanish better than vice versa.
In areas of strong Spanish influence, such as southern Brazil, Portuguese speakers understand Spanish almost completely. In nearby areasUruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, a mixed Portuguese-Spanish portuñol language arose. Classical Castilian speakers do not understand spoken Portuguese very well, although written Portuguese is usually understood to ninety percent.
For 7th grade students who have the following task in the geography contour maps: "Sign the official languages of Brazil, Venezuela and Peru", you should keep in mind that this is Spanish and Portuguese.
