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Portuguese Language Profile PORTUGUÊS |
Portuguese is one of the Romance Languages; there are almost 150
million speakers worldwide. It is the national language of Portugal
and Brazil and is an official language of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, Sao Tome and East Timor. Within Portugal itself there is
very little dialectic variation and in fact the language has changed
little since it was first given written form in the thirteenth century.
Among the features that distinguish Portuguese from Spanish, French,
Italian and Rumanian is its unusually complex phonetic structure, with
five distinct nasal vowels and an open and closed e and o.
Portuguese shares with Spanish many words of Arabic origin and, as with
all Romance languages, shows a high incidence of Greek words in its
technical and scientific vocabulary. 
During the Portuguese monarchy, Portuguese merchants, discoverers, colonizers
and missionaries carried the language abroad. Portuguese words are still
in use in areas where the language is no longer spoken, as in Japan,
India and parts of Africa. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese was
adopted as the language of Brazil. In spite of the distance between
the countries, regional differences in pronunciation and the influence
of native American languages on the formation of Brazilian Portuguese,
the two dialects remain very similar and are mutually intelligible.
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