Portuguese

Nate Simon

The Spread
Romance language
Sole official language of Portugal, Brazil,

Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, GuineaBissau, and So Tom and Prncipe

Co-official language in Macau (China),
Equatorial Guinea and East Timor
Also found in Goa, Daman and Diu in India;
in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka;
and in Malacca in Malaysia.

Mapping the Spread

History
Portuguese evolved from the medieval

language, known today by linguists as GalicianPortuguese or Old Portuguese or Old Galician, of

the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia
Latin administrative documents of the 9th
century that written Galician-Portuguese words
and phrases are first recorded
In 1290, King Denis of Portugal created the first
Portuguese university in Lisbon and decreed
that Portuguese be known as the Portuguese
language and used officially.

The second period of Old Portuguese, 15th

and 16th centuries, with the Portuguese

discoveries, the language was taken to
many regions of Africa, Asia and the
Americas
continued to be popular in parts of Asia
until the 19th century. Some Portuguesespeaking Christian communities in India, Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved
their language even after they were
isolated from Portugal

Dialects
Brazil has 16 different dialects between the

regions
Portugal has only 10
Then Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macau,
Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Spain
(Oliventian Portuguese), Uraguay and East
Timor all have their own
India has 2
Differences being mostly accents and

vocabulary. But Brazil and other dialects

there can be some grammatical differences

Conflicts
Due to its growth, It is predicted to become

the official language of all South America

and Southern Africa.
While there are no large conflicts involving
the Portuguese language, small issues
appear as the local languages are losing
support in order to compete economically
on the global level

Facts
5th most spoken language in the world with

260 million total speakers, 220 million

native speakers
3rd most spoken European language
The most spoken language in South
America, 2nd in Latin America (only behind
Spanish)