- Language details - Albanian American Spanish Arabic Armenian Brazilian Portuguese Bulgarian Canadian French Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Maltese Moldovan Montenegrin Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Simplified Chinese Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Traditional Chinese Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

Portuguese is a Romance language originated in what is now Galicia (Spain) and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin language spoken by the Romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire.
It is one of the world's major languages, ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (approx 180 million).


Currently a new international orthography agreement is being implemented for the Portuguese language. It is an attempt to unify Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil, planned for completion by around 2015.

• Portuguese is the official language of Portugal and Brazil and in a number of Africa nations.
  


• Portuguese is an official EU language.

Together with Spanish, Portuguese is the fastest growing language in Europe.
Portuguese uses 23 letters of the Latin alphabet with use of five diacritics.


Portuguese also uses Á, Â, Ã, À, Ç, É, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ, Ú.


These are not regarded as independent letters and do not have separate entries in dictionaries.


Alphabet:
A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P Q R S T U V X Z
a b c d e f g h i j l m n o p q r s t u v x z