Portuguese language

Portuguese (português) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It evolved from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula about 2000 years ago. It is the language of about half of South America, though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas.

Portuguese is also a major lingua franca in Portugal's former colonies in Africa. It is an official language in Angola, Azores, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Madeira, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe, and is also a co-official language with Cantonese Chinese in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau, Tetum in East Timor.

There are large communities of Portuguese speakers in North America, especially in the United States (New Jersey, New England, California, and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada.

There are two main groups of dialects in Portuguese, those of Brazil and those of the Old World. Differences between dialects are mostly of accent and vocabulary, but between the Brazilian dialects and other dialects, especially in their most colloquial forms, there can also be some grammatical differences. The Portuguese-based creoles spoken in various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas are independent languages which should not be confused with Portuguese itself.

The earliest surviving records of Portuguese are administrative documents of the 9th century. This phase is now known as Proto-Portuguese (between the 9th and the 12th centuries). In the first period of Old Portuguese - Galician-Portuguese Period (from the 12th to the 14th century) - the language gradually came into general use. Portugal became an independent kingdom from the Kingdom of Leon in 1139, under king Afonso I of Portugal. In 1290, king Denis of Portugal created the first Portuguese university in Lisbon and decreed that Portuguese, then simply called the "common language", should be known as the Portuguese language and used officially.

In the second period of Old Portuguese, from the 14th to the 16th centuries, with the Portuguese discoveries, the language was taken to Asia, Africa and the Americas. By the 16th century it had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia have preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.

The end of the Old Portuguese period was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans a period from the 16th century to the present day, were characterized by an increase in the number of learned words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek since the Renaissance, which greatly enriched the lexicon.
Portuguese has also provided loanwords to many languages such as Indonesian, Manado Malay, Sri Lankan Tamil, Sinhalese, Malay, Bengali, English, Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, and Japanese.

Since the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African slaves, and local populations created many pidgins with Portuguese influence. As they became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into different creole languages, which remained in use in many parts of Asia and Africa until the 18th century. Some Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creoles are still spoken today by over 3 million people worldwide.

Portuguese is written with 23 or 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, with five diacritics (acute accent, grave accent, circumflex accent, tilde, and cedilla). Accented characters and digraphs are not counted as separate letters for collation purposes.

Portuguese is a subject-verb-object language. Its nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are inflected: there are two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), diminutive and augmentative inflections, and a superlative inflection for adjectives. The Latin case system has been lost, but personal pronouns are still inflected (with three main types of forms, subject, object of verb, and object of preposition).

Verbs are highly inflected for tenses (past, present, future), moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), aspects (perfective, imperfective, and progressive), voices (active and passive), and an inflected infinitive. Adjectives normally follow the nouns which they modify.

It has a number of grammatical features that distinguish it from most other Romance languages, such as a synthetic pluperfect, a future subjunctive tense, the inflected infinitive, and a present perfect with an iterative sense. A unique feature of Portuguese is mesoclisis, the infixing of clitic pronouns in some verbal forms.

Information: Wikipedia