ABSTRACT

Portuguese belongs to the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. It is the official language of Portugal, where it is spoken by over 10 million people, and of Brazil, where the number of speakers is estimated to exceed 190 million, representing about half the population of the entire continent of South America. In the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries Portuguese was the first Indo-European language to spread to sub-Saharan Africa, where it is still the language of administration in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and San Tomé e Príncipe. (Islands of Portuguese co-official status even further afield, including Goa, East Timor and Macao, have very few native speakers any more, however.) All this puts Portuguese easily second amongst Romance languages in number of native speakers (after Spanish), and sixth overall in the world.