Influence of Portuguese

The Language

Portuguese is a romance language and is one of the official languages of the European Union including other language associations. Portuguese is an extremely popular language, with over 270 million speakers. Today, Portuguese is known as the main language of Brazil. The history of this romance language has had many effects on other languages around the world.

Influences

Galician is the closet language to Portuguese. Galician-Portuguese was spoken in Medieval Times, in the Kingdom of Galicia (northern Spain). The two languages were separated, but still share many verb tenses and vocabulary. Today, Galician is considered to be a dialect of Portuguese. These two languages also gave birth to another language, Fala. However, this language is not nearly as possible as Portuguese and Galician.

The Portuguese language has provided influence to over 15 languages around the world. In many of these influential languages, Portuguese is used as a holy language for rituals and other religious practices. The Japanese-Portuguese dictionary first documented Portuguese in a European language in the 1600s. Jesuit missionaries who visited the country brought these efforts forth. Portuguese also had a great effect on Chinese and Vietnamese.

Brazilian

Brazilian Portuguese is a large dialect, with nearly 200 million speakers. European and Brazilian Portuguese are very similar. With slight word differences, the two types of Portuguese would be closely compared with English to British English. Brazil’s language developed in the late 1800s from European Portuguese when the colonization of immigrants took place. “God’s Marines,” or the Jesuit Missionaries, were responsible for the colonization of South America. St. Ignatius founded the society. The missionaries believed in spreading their beliefs throughout the world, even in the harshest of conditions.

There are some major differences in the spelling of the two regional languages. This is mainly due to the pronunciation of words. European Portuguese has many influences from Italian pronunciation. Brazilian Portuguese tends to be more influenced from English and the missionaries who colonized the region. Today, many animals that are native to the region are named from the original Portuguese language, such as macaw and alligator. Both regions and languages do possess a formal and informal tense.