Portuguese

Portuguese, the national language of Portugal and Brazil, belongs to the Romance language group. It is descended from the Vulgar Latin of the western Iberian Peninsula (the regions of Gallaecia and Lusitania of the Roman Empire), as is Galician, often wrongly considered a dialect of Spanish. Portugal originated as a county of the Kingdom of Galicia, the westernmost area of the

Christian north of the peninsula, the south having been under Arabic rule since the eighth century. Its name derived from the towns of Porto (Oporto) and Gaia (< CALE) at the mouth of the Douro river. As Galicia was definitively incorporated into the Kingdom of Castile and León, Portugal achieved independence under the Burgundian nobility to whom the county was granted in the eleventh century. Alfonso Henriques, victor of the battle of Sa-o Mamede (1128), was the first to take the title of King of Portugal. Apart from a short period of Castilian rule (1580-1640), Portugal was to remain an independent state. The speed of the Portuguese reconquest of the Arabic areas played an important part

in the development of the language. The centre of the kingdom was already in Christian hands, after the fall of Coimbra (1064), and many previously depopulated areas had been repopulated by settlers from the north. The capture of Lisbon in 1147 and Faro in 1249 completed the Portuguese Reconquest, nearly 250 years before its Spanish counterpart, bringing northern and central settlers into the Mozarabic (arabised Romance) areas. The political centre of the kingdom also moved south, Guimarães being supplanted first by Coimbra, and subsequently by Lisbon as capital and seat of the court. The establishment of the university in Lisbon and Coimbra in 1288, to move between the two cities until its eventual establishment in Coimbra in 1537, made the centre and south the intellectual centre (although Braga in the north remained the religious capital). The form of Portuguese which eventually emerged as standard was the result of the interaction of northern and southern varieties, which gives Portuguese dialects their relative homogeneity. For several centuries after the independence of Portugal, the divergence of Portuguese

and Galician was slight enough for them to be considered variants of the same

Castilian as a lyric poetry until the middle of the fourteenth century. Portuguese first appears as the language of legal documents at the beginning of the thirteenth century, coexisting with Latin throughout that century and finally replacing it during the reign of D. Dinis (1279-1325). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the spread of the Portuguese Empire established

Portuguese as the language of colonies in Africa, India and South America. A Portuguesebased pidgin was widely used as a reconnaissance language for explorers and later as a lingua franca for slaves shipped from Africa to America and the Caribbean. Some Portuguese lexical items, e.g. pikinini ‘child’ (pequeninho, diminutive of pequeno ‘small’), save ‘know’ (saber), are common to almost all creoles. Caribbean creoles have a larger Portuguese element, whose origin is controversial – the Spanish-based Papiamentu of Curaçao is the only clear case of large-scale relexification of an originally Portuguesebased creole. Brazilian Portuguese (BP), phonologically conservative, and lexically affected by the indigenous Tupi languages and the African languages of the slave population, was clearly distinct from European Portuguese (EP) by the eighteenth century. Continued emigration from Portugal perpetuated the European norm beside Brazilian Portuguese, especially in Rio de Janeiro, where D. João and his court took refuge in 1808. After Brazil gained its independence in 1822, there was great pressure from literary and political circles to establish independent Brazilian norms, in the face of a conservative prescriptive grammatical tradition based on European Portuguese. With approaching 200 million speakers in the eight member states of the Comunidade

dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP), Portuguese is reckoned to be the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. It is spoken by 10 million people in Portugal and over 180 million in Brazil (following estimates based on the 2000 census figure of 170 million), and is the official language of Angola, Mozambique, Guiné-Bissau, São ToméPríncipe, Cape Verde and East Timor. It is spoken in isolated pockets in Goa, Malacca and Macau, and in expatriate communities in Europe and North America. Portuguese-based creoles are widely found in W. Africa and the Caribbean; Cape Verdean creole notably has official status beside Portuguese. The standard form of European Portuguese is traditionally defined as the speech of

Lisbon and Coimbra. The distinctive traits of Lisbon phonology (centralisation of /e/ to /ɐ/ in palatal contexts; uvular /R/ in place of alveolar /r/) have more recently become dominant as a result of diffusion by the mass media. Unless otherwise stated, all phonetic citation forms are of European Portuguese. Of the two main urban accents of Brazilian Portuguese, Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) shows

a greater approximation towards European norms than Paulista (São Paulo). While the extreme north and south show considerable conservatism, regional differences in Brazilian Portuguese are still less marked than class-based differences; non-standard varieties and informal speech show considerable simplification of inflectional morphology and concord, which has invited comparison with creoles.