Why is Portuguese such and important language for industry and commerce?

Consider:

- Portuguese is an official language of the European Union as ranked as the 6th most widely spoken languages in the world.

- Portuguese is the daily spoken of approximately 220 million people.

- Portuguese is spoken in four continents, it is the national language of Brazil and Portugal, and the official language of Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

 

- According UNESCO, Portuguese is the sixth most spoken native language in the world, and the third spoken European language in the world.

 

- Portuguese has been recognized as a communication language within EC, UNESCO, MERCOSUR, Organization of American States (OAS), Latin Union, Latin American Free Trade Association (ALALC), Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), Organization of African-Unity (OAU), West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), Southern African Development Community (SADC), an organization that was established to harmonize economic development among the countries in Southern Africa.

 

- A study of the number of speakers of the 8 most important European languages - from the 6th to the 20th century - shows that the Portuguese language just began to gain importance in the last 100 years.

 

- The Nobel committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1996) to Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta, "for their work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor"; and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1998) to José Saramago, "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality".

 

- The Portuguese language is also spoken in the East, especially because Portuguese speaking East Timor and Macao were Portugal's last colonies.

What is history of the Portuguese language?

Portuguese belongs to the romance languages. Its origins can be traced to 2000 years ago in what today is Northern Spain (Galicia) and Northern Portugal to the Latin that was spoken by the Romanized population of the area. As Portugal expanded as a colonial power in the 15th and 16th centuries, it established Portuguese in its empire, including Brazil, Goa in India, Angola in Africa and Macau in China.

Are there different Portuguese dialects?

Portuguese has two main groups of dialects, mainly those from Portugal and those from Brazil. Other Portuguese dialects in other parts of the world more closely resemble European Portuguese.

There are some differences between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese in vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax, especially in colloquial languages. However, these differences are natural for international languages spoken in far-away territories, and are akin to the differences of the English spoken in the United States, England and Australia.

Portuguese spoken in Brazil is the same language spoken in Portugal. However, a few words and expressions are written differently. For example, the term for “bus” can be "ônibus", in Brazil, or "autocarro", in Portugal.

In the Portuguese speaking African countries, indigenous African languages are more widely spoken, although in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, the most widely-spoken language is a the Portuguese based Creole. In East Timor the national language is “Tetum“, which is Austronesian, but influenced by Portuguese. And nowadays, Portuguese is being reintroduced as an official language of the country.

Galician was once seen as a dialect form of the Portuguese language, called Galician-Portuguese. However, nowadays, both languages exist in parallel, with translations from Galician into Portuguese and vice versa. 

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