Portuguese language
| Countries (spoken in): |
Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Chinese S.A.R. of Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe |
| Official status: |
African Union, European Union, Union of South American Nations, Mercosur, Organization of American States, Community of Portuguese Language Countries |
| Total speakers: |
177 million speakers |
As discussões para a constituição de um mercado econômico regional para a América Latina remontam ao tratado que estabeleceu a Associação.
Portuguese language (língua portuguesa) — is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain) and northern Portugal from the Latin spoken by romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) about 2000 years ago.
It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999) which spanned from Brazil in the Americas to Goa in India and Macau in China, in fact it was used exclusively on the island of Sri Lanka as the lingua franca for almost 350 years.
During that time, many creole languages based on Portuguese also appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Portuguese is a pluricentric language with two main groups of dialects, those of Brazil and those of the Old World.
For historical reasons, the dialects of Africa and Asia are generally closer to those of Portugal than the Brazilian dialects, although in some aspects of their phonetics, especially the pronunciation of unstressed vowels, they resemble Brazilian Portuguese more than European Portuguese.
They have not been studied as widely as European and Brazilian Portuguese.
Portuguese is written with the Latin alphabet, making use of five diacritics to denote stress, vowel height, contraction, nasalization, and other sound changes (acute accent, grave accent, circumflex accent, tilde, and cedilla). Brazilian Portuguese also uses the diaeresis mark.
Accented characters and digraphs are not counted as separate letters for collation purposes.
Portuguese online translators
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