Português Brasileiro: The Language

Portuguese is a Romance language similar to Spanish. It is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe. With a total of 236 million speakers, Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language in the world. The Portuguese spoken in Europe and the Portuguese spoken in Brazil are further apart in terms of pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary than the English spoken in England and the English spoken in the USA.

Alphabet: The Portuguese alphabet consists of 23 letters (lacking the K, W and Y of the English alphabet), plus 11 letters with diacritics such as the Ç. Punctuation corresponds largely to that in English.

Phonology: Brazilian Portuguese is a syllabic language, in contrast to English. It contains about 9 vowel sounds and 19 consonant sounds. This is fewer than English, and there are fewer consonant clusters. These differences can result in the following pronunciation issues:

• failure to distinguish minimal pairs such as rich/reach, pack/puck or bitch/beach
• inaudibility of unstressed vowels at the end of a word, e.g., part (for party)
• the inclusion of vowel sounds before, between or following consonants, e.g.,  monthes (for months) or facybooky (for facebook)
• substitution of ear for hear or high for I.

This explains why even some very proficient Portuguese speakers of English never lose their accent.

Brazilian tongue speaks Brazilian Portuguese

 Verb/Tense: Much of the English verb system will be familiar to Portuguese learners since the same features exist in their own language. However, some significant differences exist, which may lead to mistakes of negative transfer. For example, interrogatives in Portuguese are conveyed by intonation. This results in questionable English such as You like me? or He came to school yesterday? The use of the double negative in Portuguese leads to such errors as I don't know nothing (Eu não sei nada).

Grammar: Just like French, there is a single possessive pronoun for his/her which agrees in gender with the item possessed. This can lead to ambiguity in sentences such as: She's having lunch with his brother (= her brother). There is only one question tag in Portuguese, in contrast to English which has several different ones depending on the tense and form of the opening words. The tag is simply né (isn’t it). Errors such as She's coming tomorrow, isn't it? are the result.

Vocabulary: Because of shared Latin roots there are many English/Portuguese cognates, which can facilitate the acquisition of a strong academic vocabulary. (There is less overlap in everyday vocabulary of the two languages.) Observe the following sentence:
A estabilidade econômica facilitou a prosperidade e criou uma maior qualidade de vida.
The economic stability has facilitated prosperity and created a higher quality of life.
Notice that with many words, all it takes is a simple transformation.

Portuguese words of an Arabic origin

A spelling reform in Portugal in 1911 made Portuguese spelling much more phonetic in order to help raise standards of literacy in the country. Almost everything is spelt the way it is said, with consistent exceptions.

Some interesting terms:

Portuguese	Literal Translation	Actual Meaning
café de manha	morning coffee	breakfast
eu estou com fome/frio	I am with hunger/cold	I’m hungry/cold
parabéns (for birthday)	congratulations	happy birthday
legal	legal	cool (as in cool party)/legal
meia (when reading a 6)	half	six
pois não?	because no?	can I help you
obrigado/obrigada	I’m obliged	thank you
imagina (an interjection)	imagine	you’re welcome
tudo bem?	all good?	how are you?

Misc: ‘The’ is added in front of all nouns, even names. ‘O’ is for masculine, ‘a’ is for feminine. For example, I am o Bader (the Bader).

Brazilians change the ending to –inha or –inho to describe smaller things, or to affectionately call someone. For example, cat is gato, and kitten is gatinho. Small is pequeno, tiny is pequeninho, and teeny tiny is pequenininho. Using this, my nickname would be Baderzinho.

Museum of the Portuguese Language, São Paulo

They use the word ‘feira’ after each weekday, which means market. Ironically, Sunday is usually the day with big street markets, but it has no –feira at the end.

Many nouns have a plural in Portuguese but not in English. For example, informations (informações). O trânsito no centro das atenções translates to The traffic in the spotlight (literal: attentions).

Last but not least, cars are masculine, but in French, Italian and Arabic, they are feminine. I think the Portuguese got it wrong, because when you go to fill up gas, you insert the…well, you get the idea. Therefore, cars are feminine.