| PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE
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SOME FACTS
Portuguese language, member of the Romance
group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European
family of languages. It is the mother tongue
of about 170 million people, chiefly in
Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the
Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil
(154 million speakers); and in Portugal's
former overseas provinces in Africa and
Asia (about 5 million speakers). Although
the Portuguese spoken in Portugal differs
to some extent from the Portuguese current
in Brazil, with reference to pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary, the differences
are not major. A distinctive phonetic feature
of Portuguese is the nasalization of certain
vowels and diphthongs, which can be indicated
by a tilde placed above the appropriate
vowel. The acute and circumflex accents
serve to make clear both stress and pronunciation
and also to distinguish homonyms. The grave
accent is a guide to pronunciation. It can
also indicate a contraction, as in as, which
is a combination of a “to” and
as “the” (feminine plural).
A c with a cedilla (c) is pronounced like
c in English place when used before the
vowels a, o, and u. As in Spanish, there
are two forms of the verb “to be”:
ser, which denotes a comparatively permanent
state and which also precedes a predicate
noun, and estar, which denotes a comparatively
temporary condition. Again like Spanish,
Portuguese tends to use reflexive verbs
instead of the passive voice. Historically,
Portuguese, which developed from the Vulgar
Latin brought to the Iberian Peninsula by
its Roman conquerors, could be distinguished
from the parent tongue before the 11th cent.
The Portuguese spoken in Lisbon and Coimbra
gave rise to the Standard Portuguese of
today. Although the greater part of the
Portuguese vocabulary comes from Latin,
a number of words have also been absorbed
from Arabic, French, and Italian, and also
from some of the indigenous South American
and African languages.
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