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The Portuguese Language
The Portuguese language, spoken by nearly 200 million people around the world, is the third most spoken European language in the world. It ranks eighth among the most spoken languages in the world and is the main language in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, São Tomé, Cape Verde, East Timor, and the archipelagos of Madeira and Azores. It is also widely spoken in India, Angola, the United States, the UK, Canada, France and Germany.
The Portuguese language is one of the Romance languages, evolved from Latin and developed on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula (now Portugal and the Spanish province of Galicia). It is very similar to Spanish, and also related to Italian, French, Catalan, and Romanian.
There are two genders: masculine and feminine, but no neutral. Although Portuguese language grammar is much more complex than English, it is similar to the other romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and French.
There are two main types of Portuguese language spoken: European and Brazilian Portuguese.
This difference is mainly because Brazil gained independence from the Portuguese in 1822, and the space of time generated room for influences from different dialects and other languages, namely Spanish and English. The Portuguese language became therefore altered in pronunciation and syntactic form.
On the other hand, all other Portuguese ex-colonies got independent much much later, only after the Portuguese revolution of 1974. Also, when you learn Portuguese, if you want to analyse the origin of the words, you can see that many words that are nowadays used in Brazil, are old-fashioned words in Portugal and the other Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) countries.
Also called Continental Portuguese, European Portuguese is spoken in Portugal ,Macau, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde and East Timor. Brazilian Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, developed from the influence of African and indigenous languages in South America.
Although basically the same language, both of these Portuguese languages differ in varying degrees from pronunciation and intonation, to grammar and vocabulary.
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