Introduction To Brazilian Portuguese
What good would any site be if it didn’t first start off by giving a backstory of the topic at hand?
Well… not very good, I think. So, let’s do that now.
As you are aware by this point, Brazilians do not speak Spanish, as a majority of the English-speaking world tends to assume. But rather, they speak Portuguese which comes, of course, from the country of Portugal.
Now, the reason so many people think that Brazilians speak Spanish is due to the fact that pretty much the rest of South America does.
Spain and Portugal are countries in Europe that border each other, and both countries colonized different areas of Central and South America hundreds of years ago, much as the British colonized the United States. For this reason, pretty much everywhere south of Texas and California, people’s first language is typically either Spanish or Portuguese, rather than English.
As you can imagine, the hundreds of years that have passed since Brazil’s colonization has led to the Portuguese language differing a bit from its native homeland in Portugal. In fact, Brazilian Portuguese can be considered quite different at this point. Much like the differences between American English and the English you would encounter in England, for example.
The languages are the same at their core, but there are many words, phrases, euphemisms, and slang terms that simply would not be understood from one country to the other without familiarity of both.
And not only that, but even in Brazil itself, depending on the region in which you are physically located, there are differences in words, pronunciations, and even in the accent itself. For example, think about the differences among the accents in say, Louisiana or Alabama and that of New Jersey or New York.
The language is still English, but the differences among the accents, depending on which state you are in, cause the language to seem almost foreign. It is the same way in Brazil.
To further support your language-learning journey, check out my comprehensive Portuguese Resources Page for a curated list of tools and programs that will accelerate your progress.
-Galilee Berman
