Many years ago, my girlfriend and I were on a mini-golf course on Cape Cod when I heard people behind us speaking in an unfamiliar language. I said to Lisa, "what is that, Hebrew?" Highly amused, she - a Portuguese major in college - replied "no, silly, they´re from Brazil!" (of course I did feel silly, but in my defense, at the time I was 19 and had not been exposed to many foreign languages beyond French, German, and Spanish). In the years to come, I too studied Portuguese a bit, and during my years living in Miami I was often encountered it spoken by the many Brazilians who lived and visited there. I visited Portugal two or three times during those years, but it was only when I moved to its Iberian neighbor Spain 5½ years ago that I started being more exposed to the language´s original, continental form, and started focusing on the differences between them.
Both are fully mutually intelligible, much like British and Australian English and that spoken in the United States — yet the cultural flavor, pronunciation, and idiomatic expressions give each variety a distinct personality. Continental Portuguese feels concise and compact, whereas Brazilian often feels open and melodic. To understand a bit why, it helps to know that after Portugal started colonizing a huge swath of South America 525 years ago, its language mixed with indigenous tongues such as Tupi-Guarani, languages brought slaves imported from Africa, and later influences from immigrants from Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, sowing the seeds of a more phonetic, flexible variant. It also retained features that are closer to older forms of Portuguese spoken during the colonial period, compared to how the language evolved in Europe. Then after Brazil’s independence in 1822, spelling and usage began to separate further, and although later spelling reforms like those of 1990 (which were put into effect only slowly) have tried to unify spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax can still differ quite a bit. Here´s a bit of what I´ve learned about some of the main differences:
Phonetics
Pronunciation of Unstressed Vowels
Continental Portuguese tends to reduce or cut out vowels at the ends of words. So for example telefone (telephone) is pronouced "tɨ.lɨ.ˈfɔn," while the Brazilian version keeps vowels open and clear ("te.le.ˈfo.ni").
Syllable Timing vs. Stress Timing
Europeans often “swallows” syllables, making speech faster and harder for learners to follow, while Brazilian Portuguese sounds more “musical,” with clear vowels in almost every syllable.
Pronunciation of “S” at the End of Words
In most of Portugal, it´s pronounced pretty straightforwardly, whereas in Brazil, it becomes "ʃ," like "sh" in English.
Vocabulary
In general, Brazilian Portuguese kept a number of words and terms that later fell out of use in Europe words, and added others for plants, animals and foods native to Brazil.
Here are several examples:
As per the illustration at the top, bus in Portugal is autocarro, while in Brazil it´s ônibus.
For ice cream, the Portuguese say gelado and Brazilians say sorvete (and by the way, "sorbet" is also sorvete, which I suppose can be confusing in some limited circumstances).
Cell (mobile) phone in Europe is telemóvel and in Brazil it´s celular.
The European words for boy and girl are rapaz and rapariga or gajo and gaja, respectively, and for Brazilians they´re garoto and garota (as in the famous song Garota de Ipanema; and a word to the wise: in Brazil rapariga can mean “prostitute”!).
In Portugal, the word for place is sitio while in Brazil it´s lugar.
Trem is the word for train in Brazil and the Europeans say comboio.
Grammar and Syntax
Personal and Object Pronouns
The difference I notice most of all has to do with second-person pronouns. In Portugal, "you" is either tu (informal) or você (formal), but in most of Brazil it´s just você (though in some regions up north and down south, tu is also used). So to say "you speak well," in Europe it would be "tu falas bem" while in Brazil is would be "você fala bem."
Also, the Portuguese often attach pronouns to verbs: “Dar-me-ás notícias? (“will you give me news?)." Brazilians usually put the before verbs: Você vai me dar notícias? (are you going to give me news?)."
Progressive Aspect
To say, for example, "I´m writing a letter," Europeans use the verb to be, estar, plus the infinitve ("estou a escrever uma carta") and Brazilians estar plus the gerund form ("estou escrevendo uma carta”).
Spelling
Before the 1990 orthographic agreement (fully implemented in the 2010s), spelling differences were more visible, with European Portugues keeping "silent" consonants in words like *acção* and *óptimo while Brazilians dropped them in favor of ação and ótimo; these days the latter are used in both countries, although other differences still remain.
For more, check out this video from my favorite language nerd YouTube channel, LangFocus:
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