Why Portuguese is Brazil's Official Language!

Linked table of contents

History
Difference in language
Impact
FAQs

Brazil is a big country in the South American continent. It's the largest country in South America and the fifth-largest country in the world based on both population and geography. Brazil is the only country that speaks Portuguese in the entire American continent.

On the eastern side of the continent, a 4,500-mile Brazil forms an enormous triangle along the Atlantic Ocean. It shares the boundary with every country in the South American continent except Chile and Ecuador.

In 1143, a Southern European country was founded, whose official name is the Portuguese Republic. Portugal founded the first global empire. There are 250 million Portuguese speakers around the world.

With lots of diverse people and cultures Brazil is a major player on the world stage, but one of the questions that are usually asked is why its official language is Portuguese and not some other language like Spanish. But the history is a little complex.

History

If you look at the map of the whole American continent carefully, in Latin America, everybody speaks Spanish. But there is a story behind Brazil speaking Portuguese.

During the 15th century, Portugal and Spain were the countries that invested the most in exploration and navigation to discover new commercial roads to India. India is the country where spices were traded at the time when Portugal was on the rise.

So, investments, knowledge of navigation, and favorable geographical position were factors that contributed to the period that started to be called the age of discovery. On this site, you have Portuguese discovering a new road to India across the African coast, passing by the famous Cape of Good Hope. On the other hand, you have Spainiards who arrived on a new continent in 1492, which started to be called America.

But a Spanish financial navigator discovered the American continent at the same time. Spain rushed to colonize that unknown region; it didn't take long, and Portugal also wanted a piece of land.

Soon, misunderstandings started to be created between the nations. To avoid a war between Portugal and Spain, Pope Alexander VI established an agreement. This agreement was an imaginary line dividing the globe into two pieces. It was called the treaty of ‘Tordesillas’. Spain signed this treaty on 2 July 1494 and Portugal signed this treaty on 5 September 1494. Spain got the west side and Portugal the east side.

Because of this agreement, Spain was able to colonize all these places that we nowadays call Latin America. Portugal became a tiny little piece of land on the Atlantic coastm and this little piece is the Brazilian coast that we can see today.

Here in Brazil, it took place in 1500 by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral and that's why Portuguese colonization was established in Brazil.

Consequently, Brazil inherited the Portuguese language and it’s still the official language. Until today, there are many incentives of the Brazilian government to teach Spanish due to the economic relations that we have with the countries from South America.

Difference in language

Portuguese people and Brazilians still speak the same language but it's slightly different. Brazilian Portuguese is different from Portuguese in phonology and prosody from dialects spoken in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries.

Despite this difference between the spoken varieties, Brazilian and European Portuguese differ little in formal writing and remain mutually intelligible.

Impact

In the last decades of the 20th century, Brazilian Portuguese had a greater cultural influence on the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world because of the increasing popularity of music of Brazil and its soap operas, and also because Brazil joined the South American free trade agreement with partner countries that speak Spanish.

Across the entire globe, Portuguese is the official language of ten countries. The maximum Portuguese speakers in Brazil and Europe. Portugal is the only country in which the official language is Portuguese.

Portuguese immigration to America is the reason behind the existence of Portuguese in Brazil. In the 16th century, the first Portuguese-speaking settlers arrived in Brazil. At that time, the Portuguese language was not commonly used. In the 18th century, Portuguese became the official language of Brazil.

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