Portuguese

Portuguese is a Romance language (in other words, it derives fom Latin). It is the official language of Portugal, Brazil and other former Portuguese colonies in Africa: Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guiné-Bissau and São Tomé e Príncipe. Portuguese speakers are also found in Macau (China), East Timor (South East Asia) and in Goa in India.

In 2007, research estimated that there were 236 million Portuguese speakers in the world. (190 million plus of whom live in Brazil).

Do you know why they speak Portuguese in Brazil and not Spanish like in the rest of South America? (Top clue: the Treaty of Tordesillas!).

São Paulo in Brazil is the city with the greatest number of Portuguese-language speakers in the world and in March 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language was opened there.

Hello: Ola’

Please: Por favor

Thank you: Obrigado (for boys) / Obrigada (for girls)

Lewis the Lion thinks that the fact that he speaks a bit of Spanish is helping him to learn Portuguese as these ‘magic’ words sound so much like Spanish words:

Ola‘ in Portuguese but Hola in Spanish.

Por favor sounds just the same although in Spanish sometimes the ‘v’ sound, sounds like a soft ‘b’.

The word for thank you, obrigado or obrigada he remembers because it sounds a little bit like the word ‘obliged‘ in English which is also a word you might use in English to express thanks or gratitude.

Do you have any other ways that you could remember these words in Portuguese? Maybe you could share your ideas here?

Lewis the Lion also is also grateful that he speaks Italian because the word used in Brazil for goodbye is ‘tchau‘ which sounds just like the Italian word “ciao!”

Lewis also discovered in Brazil, just like back home in England there are different accents and dialects according to where you live geographically. These are some of the main accents he discovered:

Rio de Janeiro – Carioca (the resident and the accent)

São Paulo – Paulistano (the resident) Paulista (the accent)

Salvador – Fortaleza

Amazon Forest where there are lots of natives – Amazonense

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>