Brazil - a country located in South America, occupies 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, spoken by more than two hundred million people in South America and Europe. The official language of Brazil is dedicated to this article.
Brazilian language
What is the official language in Brazil? The Brazilian Portuguese is a collection of Portuguese dialects used mainly in Brazil. Almost all 200 million inhabitants of the country speak it. It is widely distributed in the Brazilian diaspora, which currently consists of about two million people who emigrated to other countries.
This variation of the Portuguese language differs, especially in phonetics and word stress, from the options spoken in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries. In African countries, it tends to be more closely connected with the modern European Portuguese language, partly because Portuguese colonial rule ended there much later than in Brazil. Despite these differences between the spoken varieties, Brazilian and European Portuguese are not much different in formal writing. This phenomenon is in many ways similar to the differences between American and British English.
Portuguese 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 to unify the two standards that were then used by Brazil, on the one hand, and other Portuguese-speaking countries, on the other . This spelling reform came into force in Brazil on January 1, 2009. In Portugal, the reform was signed by the President on July 21, 2008 and included a six-year adaptation period during which both spelling variants coexisted. All countries of this community have signed the text of this document. In Brazil, this reform has been in force since January 2016. Portugal and other Portuguese-speaking countries have also begun to use the new spelling.
The regional variations of the Brazilian Portuguese language, while remaining mutually intelligible, may differ from one another in such matters as pronunciation of vowels and intonation of speech.
Features of the Brazilian Portuguese
The question is often asked: what language is official in Brazil? Since the Brazilian language does not exist, Brazilians speak their version of Portuguese.
The use of Portuguese in Brazil is a legacy of the colonization of America. The first wave of Portuguese-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil in the 16th century, but the language was not widely used then. For some time, the Portuguese coexisted with a lingua franca language called lingua geral, based on the Indian languages used by Jesuit missionaries, as well as various African languages spoken by millions of slaves brought into the country between the 16th and 19th centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese language had established itself as a national language. One of the main factors contributing to this rapid change was the expansion 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.
Since the beginning of the 18th century, the Portuguese government has made efforts to expand the use of Portuguese throughout the colony. Particularly 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), the Brazilians began to prefer the Portuguese language, as he expelled the Jesuit missionaries who taught Lingua geral and forbade the use of other local dialects.
The failed attempts to colonize the city of Rio de Janeiro by the French in the 16th century and the Dutch in the northeast of the country in the 17th century had little impact on Portuguese. Significant waves of settlers who did not speak Portuguese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (mainly from Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Japan and Lebanon) were linguistically integrated into the Portuguese-speaking majority for several generations, with the exception of some regions from three southern states (Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul). What official language is spoken in Brazil? Of course, this is Portuguese, which is owned by 97 percent of the country's population.
The current situation of the language
Currently, the vast majority of Brazilians speak Portuguese as their mother tongue, 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 populated by Native Americans. And even these population groups use the Portuguese language to communicate with strangers, watch and listen to television and radio programs on it. In addition, there is a community of Brazilian sign language users, the number of which, according to experts, reaches 3 million.
Where do they speak portuguese
What language is spoken in Brazil? The official Brazilian language is Portuguese. Portuguese is also the only official language in 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, speakers of Portuguese and mixed Creole languages 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 islands in the Caribbean, where they speak Creole languages based on Portuguese. The Creole language of the island of Cape Verde is the most widely known Portuguese Creole. Portuguese-speaking individuals are commonly called luzophones in English and Portuguese.
Influence
Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romanesque group, which developed from several dialects of vulgar Latin in the medieval kingdom of Galicia and retained some phonetic and lexical features of the Celtic languages. This is a general description of the official language of Brazil.
Portuguese is native to approximately 215-220 million people. The total number of carriers is 260 million. This language is the sixth largest number of speakers in the world, the third most common European language and one of the main ones in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also one of the most spoken languages in South America and the second most spoken language in Latin America after Spanish. It is the official language of the European Union and African Union.
Portuguese is a fast-paced language
According to UNESCO, Portuguese is the fastest growing European language after English. According to The Portugal News, which published data from UNESCO, it has the highest growth potential as international in southern Africa and South America. Portuguese is a global language that is 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 is compulsory or taught in schools in these South American countries.
At the beginning of the 21st century, after Macao was handed over to China, and Brazilian immigration to Japan slowed down, the use of Portuguese in Asia was reduced. It is again becoming the language of opportunity there mainly due to the expansion of diplomatic and financial ties with economically powerful Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, etc.) in the world.
Number of carriers
What is the official language of Brazil? In July 2017, the total number of Portuguese speakers is estimated at 279 million. This number does not include the diaspora of losophones, 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 Portuguese speakers, since a significant portion of these people are naturalized citizens born outside Brazil and Portugal, and immigrant children can only have basic language skills. It is also important to note that a significant part of the diaspora is part of the already estimated population of Portuguese-speaking countries and territories.
Therefore, Portuguese 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 the implementation of 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 got through other Romance languages. However, due to his original Celtic heritage, and then Portugal's participation in the discovery era, he has some Celtic words and also borrowed vocabulary from around 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 Native American dialects, then various African languages spoken slaves, and finally the languages of later European and Asian immigrants. Although the vocabulary is still predominantly Portuguese, the influence of other languages is manifested in the Brazilian vocabulary, which today includes, for example:
- Hundreds of words of Tupi-Guarani origin related 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.
- Numerous 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 fell into vocabulary during the Arab conquest of the Pyrenees. They are common to Brazilians and Portuguese.
Words borrowed from the Native American language Tupi are especially common in toponyms (geographical names). Portuguese also adopted the names of most plants and animals living in Brazil in this language. Most official animal names in Portuguese speaking countries are also Native American in origin. However, many toponyms of tupi-guarani are not a direct result of Native American expressions, but were actually invented by European settlers and Jesuit missionaries, who in the first centuries of colonization made extensive use of lingua geral. Many of the American words entered the Portuguese vocabulary as early as the 16th century, and some of them were eventually borrowed into other European languages.
In the period from the ninth to the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese acquired almost 800 words from the Arabic language under the influence of the Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the original Arabic article "al". This category of words includes many common terms such as village, olive oil, hotel. Thus, the official language of Brazil contains many borrowings.
Languages of South America
In fact, in South America, two languages are used - Spanish and Portuguese, which are closely related. Does not have Spanish as official in Brazil. However, it is widely studied in schools and universities of the country. There is a close linguistic interaction. Thus, Portuguese is the only official language of Brazil. Venezuela and Peru use Spanish as a state. The number of speakers of these languages in South America is approximately equal.
Unlike Spanish, Portuguese has retained older speech forms on the one hand, and on the other contains a huge number of sound innovations of uncertain (most likely Celtic) origin. A set of vowel sounds, the specifics of the pronunciation of certain sounds, a change in the 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. Moreover, due to the specifics of pronunciation of vowels, Portuguese speakers better understand spoken Spanish than vice versa.
In areas of strong influence of Spanish speech, for example, in the southern part of Brazil, Portuguese-speaking speakers understand Spanish almost completely. In the nearby territories of Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, Portuguese-Spanish mixed portugnole emerged. Speakers of classical Castilian do not understand oral Portuguese very well, although they usually understand ninety percent of the written Portuguese language.
Pupils of the 7th grade, who have such a task in their geographic maps: “Sign the official languages of Brazil, Venezuela and Peru,” should bear in mind that these are Spanish and Portuguese.