About Portuguese

by Pisith Phlong

Number of speakers
Portuguese is an official language of Portugal and Brazil. Approximately 170 million people in Brazil and about 10 million people in Portugal speak Portuguese. It is also the official language of Angola, Mozambique, Guiné-Bissau, São Tomé-Príncipe and Cabo Verde. (Frawley, p. 371) In Southeast Asia, it is spoken by a few communities in Malaysia (Malacca) and Indonesia and it is one of the two official languages of East Timor. (Price, p. 370)

Language group
Portuguese is a member of the Ibero-Romance subgroup. It belongs to the Romance group of the Indo-European language family. (Price, p. 364)

History of written language and script
As a member of Romance group, Portuguese is originated from Vulgar Latin which was brought into the Iberian Peninsula around 218 – 19 BC. The peninsula was later divided into two, Hispania Ulterior consisting of Baetica and Lusitania, controlled by the Roman aristocracy and Hispania Citerior, consisting of Tarraconensis and Galicia, controlled by military men. Portuguese arose in the northwest part of the Iberian Peninsula called the country of Portucale and formed its language with the Kingdom of Galicia before it started to move southward. (Brown, p. 762-763) It was not until the 12th century that Portugal became independent from Galicia and began to expend its language influence over other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. (Prince, p. 366; Frawley, p. 371) The expansion of Portuguese reached most parts of the world in the 15th and 16th centuries, with Brazil now having the most Portuguese speakers in the world.

The history of Portuguese in Southeast Asia began in the 16th century through the expansion of trade and Catholic missionary work. The Portuguese controlled Malacca from 1511 to 1641 A.D. and established the first school to teach Portuguese in 1545; this also lead to the adoption of Roman scripts in Malay writing. (Muzzi, p. 29-31) Not only did Portuguese influence Malay, but it also influenced the languages of Indonesia and East Timor. The Portuguese expansion in the Malay Archipelago in search of spices introduced the language and Catholic faith to people living on many separate islands such as Java, Borneo, Celebes, and Timor. (Muzzi, p. 59) There are about 600 Portuguese words registered in the Indonesian language, as well as in the Malay language, ranging from everyday life expressions related to family, household, vegetables and fruits to administration, military and navigation. (Muzzi, p. 61) In East Timor, Portuguese is used alongside with Tetun as a co-official language after a long occupation by the Portuguese since the 16th century. Portuguese also influenced Vietnamese writing through religious script texts which led to a formation of Quoc ngu scripts (to replace the Chu nom). An important record of the Portuguese in Vietnam was a dictionary titled Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary in Quoc ngu, produced by Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651. (Nguyen, p.14).

Language
Portuguese shares the same roots and is thus similar to Spanish. A number of words in Portuguese originated from Latin during the earlier Christian period. The language also borrowed Arabic words as it moved southward to the Southern Iberian Peninsular in the 12th – 13th century. More recently, word loans from French and English have entered the Portuguese vocabulary. (Frawley, p. 374) Following the Portuguese occupation over Brazil from the 16th century and movement of the Portuguese into Brazil in the 19th century, Portuguese became the national language of Brazil. Portuguese is divided into two major language forms, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, which are noticeably different in consonant and accentuation changes. European Portuguese is classified into 3 different periods: Old Portuguese (from the earliest times to 1540), Classical Portuguese (1540-1850), and Modern Portuguese (1850 to the present). (Price, p. 367) Portuguese is characterized as an inflectional language where nouns and adjectives change form based on gender and number, and different suffixes are added to a verb according to a proceeding pronoun. (Frawley, p. 372)

Scripts
Because of the influence from Vulgar Latin in the early Christian period, Portuguese employs Roman scripts for its writing. The oldest Portuguese records, both literary and nonliterary texts, date back as early as the 12th century A.D, after the Portuguese gained independence from the Galicia. The oldest literary texts are the Cantiga d' Escárnio in 1196 by Joan Soárez, the Cantiga da Ribeirinha by D. Sancho I, and the Cantiga de Garvaia by Pai Soares de Taveirós, and the oldest nonliterary texts are the Testamento de D. Afonso II dated in 1214 A.D and the Noticia de Torto written between 1214 and 1216 A.D. These earlier Portuguese writing used a number of Latin words, but they were later replaced by new Portuguese terms at about the 14th century. (Brown, p. 763)

Other Dialects
European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are different in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary usages and syntax. The official European Portuguese is based on the dialect spoken in Lisbon and Coimbra while the official Brazilian Portuguese is based on dialects spoken in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. (Frawley, p. 371) A few Portuguese dialects spoken in Portugal are: 1) Minhoto, in the northern area; 2) Baixo Alentejo, spoken in regions close to Spanish border; 3) Beirão, in the central region of Beira Alta and Beira Baixa; 4) Leoness, in the northeastern region of Trás-os-Montes, consisting of Mirandês, Sendinês, Rionorês and Guadramilês; 5) Portuguese of Madeira Island; 6) Portuguese of Azores Island. 7) Central dialect, spoken between Lisbon and Coimbra. (Brown, p. 764)

Comparison to Western languages
Portuguese is similar to other western languages, but is most closely related to Spanish and French. Its sentence structure is Subject-Verb-Object and adjectives are preceded by nouns in noun phrases. Portuguese nouns are classified by gender, 'masculine/faminine' and an inflection between noun and adjective is very common regarding gender and number. Suffixes play an important role in formatting tenses and are varied according to personal pronouns and gender. (Frawley, p. 372)

References

• Azevedo, M. M. A Contrastive Phonology of Portuguese and English. Georgetwon University Press: Washington, D. C., 1981.
• Brown, K. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 9. (2nd ed.). Elsevier: Oxford, 2006.
• Costa, J. Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000.
• Franca, A. P. Portuguese Influence in Indonesia. Gunung Agung: Jakata, 1970.
• Frawley, W. J. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 4. (3nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Muzzi, G. A. The Portuguese in Malay Land. Printmate Sdn Bhd: Malaysia, 2002.
• Nguyen, D. H.  Language in Vietnamese Society: Some Articles by Nguyẽn Đình-Hòa. Asia Books: Carbondale, Illinois, 1980.
• Price, G. Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Blackwell Publisher Inc.: Oxford, 1998.
• Teixeira, M. The Portuguese Missions in Mallaca and Singapore (1511 – 1958), Volume 1. Agência Geral Do Ultramar: Lisboa, 1961.
• Whitlam, J., Davies, V. and Harland, M. Harper Collins: Portuguese Concise Ditionary.