24 Facts About Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese is the set of varieties of the Portuguese language native to Brazil and the most influential form of Portuguese worldwide.

Portugal and other Brazilian Portuguese-speaking countries have since begun using the new orthography.

Existence of Brazilian Portuguese in Brazil is a legacy of the Brazilian Portuguese colonization of the Americas.

The first wave of Brazilian Portuguese-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil in the 16th century, but the language was not widely used then.

The substantial waves of non-Brazilian Portuguese-speaking immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were linguistically integrated into the Brazilian Portuguese-speaking majority within few generations, except for some areas of the three southernmost states, in the case of Germans, Italians and Slavics, and in rural areas of the state of Sao Paulo .

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Later, agreements were reached to preserve at least an orthographic unity throughout the Brazilian Portuguese-speaking world, including the African and Asian variants of the language .

Several Brazilian writers have been awarded with the highest prize of the Portuguese language.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, Cecilia Meireles, Clarice Lispector, Jose de Alencar, Rachel de Queiroz, Jorge Amado, Castro Alves, Antonio Candido, Autran Dourado, Rubem Fonseca, Lygia Fagundes Telles and Euclides da Cunha are Brazilian writers recognized for writing the most outstanding work in the Portuguese language.

The word accao in European Brazilian Portuguese became acao in Brazil, European optimo became otimo in Brazil, and so on, where the consonant was silent both in BP and EP, but the words were spelled differently.

The variant spellings are necessary in those cases because the general Brazilian Portuguese spelling rules mandate a stress diacritic in those words, and the Brazilian Portuguesediacritics encode vowel quality.

Brazilian Portuguese makes extensive use of verbs in the progressive aspect, almost as in English.

Brazilian Portuguese seldom has the present continuous construct estar a + infinitive, which, in contrast, has become quite common in European over the last few centuries.

In general, the dialects that gave birth to Brazilian Portuguese had a quite flexible use of the object pronouns in the proclitic or enclitic positions.

In some cases, in order to adapt this use to the standard grammar, some Brazilian Portuguese scholars recommend that ela vem me pagando should be written like ela vem-me pagando, in which case the enclisis could be totally acceptable if there would not be a factor of proclisis.

Brazilian Portuguese has eight oral vowels, five nasal vowels, and several diphthongs and triphthongs, some oral and some nasal.

Vowels in Brazilian Portuguese generally are pronounced more openly than in European Portuguese, even when reduced.

Main difference among the dialects of Brazilian Portuguese is the frequent presence or absence of open vowels in unstressed syllables.

The variants of use in each dialect of Brazilian Portuguese are mostly a matter of preference: it does not usually mean a dialect completely abandoned either form.

L-variant represents a simplified form of the language that could have evolved from 16th-century Brazilian Portuguese, influenced by Amerindian and African languages, while H-variant would be based on 19th-century European Brazilian Portuguese .

Milton M Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monograph: Portuguese language, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.

The teaching of Brazilian Portuguese has traditionally meant imparting a prescriptive formal standard based on a literary register that is often at variance with the language with which students are familiar.

Brazilian Portuguese Vernacular is still frowned upon by most grammarians and language teachers.

Since Brazil joined Mercosul, the South American free trade zone, Brazilian Portuguese has been increasingly studied as a foreign language in Spanish-speaking partner countries.

Many words of Brazilian origin have entered into English: samba, bossa nova, cruzeiro, milreis and capoeira.