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Portuguese Facts
Portuguese is the eighth most spoken language and the third most spoken European language in the world (after English and Spanish) and, together with Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, comprise the five modern Romance languages.
While the Portuguese language has its roots firmly in Europe, most of the world's 210+ million Portuguese speaking people live elsewhere. It is the 6th most spoken language in the world.
Because there are some similarities between Spanish and Portuguese, and both are a product of the Iberian peninsula, many erroneously believe that Portuguese is merely a dialect of Spanish. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Spoken in: Angola, Andorra, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Luxembourg, Macau (China), Mozambique, Namibia, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and other countries.
It is the mother tongue of about 200 million people, chiefly in Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil (184 million speakers); and in Portugal's former overseas provinces in Africa and Asia (about 5 million speakers).
Official language of: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe
Statistics:
- Brazil - 184,101,109
- Portugal - 10,524,145
- France - 750,000
- Paraguay - 636,000
- South Africa - 617,000
- United States - 365,000
- Goa - 250,000
- Canada - 86,925
- Switzerland - 86,000
- Belgium - 80,000
- Germany - 78,000
- Angola - 57,600
- Luxembourg - 50,000
- Mozambique - 30,000
- Uruguay - 28,000
- Malawi - 9,000
- Jamaica - 5,000
- Sao Tome and Principe - 2,580
- Andorra - 2,100
- Macau - 2,000
- Congo - 600
- Antigua and Barbuda (?)
- Cape Verde Islands - 14,817
- East Timor (?)
- Guinea Bissau (?)
- Guyana (?)
- Spain (?)
- St. Vincent and the Grenadines (?)
- Surinam (?)
- United Kingdom - 17,000
Historically, Portuguese, which developed from the Vulgar Latin, brought to the Iberian Peninsula by its Roman conquerors, could be distinguished from the parent tongue before the 11th cent. The Portuguese spoken in Lisbon and Coimbra gave rise to the Standard Portuguese of today.
Although the greater part of the Portuguese vocabulary comes from Latin, a number of words have also been absorbed from Arabic, French, and Italian, and also from some of the indigenous South American and African languages.
Member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages.