ThePortuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 (Portuguese:Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990) is aninternational treaty whose purpose is to create a unifiedorthography for thePortuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as theirofficial language. It was signed inLisbon, on 16 December 1990, at the end of a negotiation, begun in 1980, between theSciences Academy of Lisbon and theBrazilian Academy of Letters. The signatories included official representatives from all of thePortuguese-language countries exceptEast Timor, which was underIndonesian occupation at the time, but later adhered to the Agreement, in 2004, andEquatorial Guinea, which adopted Portuguese as an official language only in 2010.
Galicia was invited to take part in the reform but theSpanish government ignored the invitation, since it officially regardsGalician and Portuguese as different languages. However, an unofficial commission formed by Galician linguists who support theunity of the language attended the meetings as observers.[1]
As of 2023, the agreement has been ratified and implemented by thePortuguese-speaking countriesPortugal,Brazil andCape Verde. Countries likeAngola andMozambique still use the old orthography and have not completed the adoption of the reform. The former Portuguese colony ofMacau is not a party to the agreement and retains the old orthography. The agreement's objectives of unifying the orthography in allCPLP countries and compiling a common vocabulary for the entire Portuguese language have not been fully achieved and failed.[citation needed][unbalanced opinion?]
As of thedecade of 2020, the agreement does not have complete adoption from the Portuguese-speaking countries, still without reaching its objectives of unification of the orthography and compilation of a vocabulary common to theLusophony.
The Orthographic Agreement of 1990 intended to establish a single official orthography for the Portuguese language and thus to improve its international status, putting an end to the existence of two official orthographic norms: one in Brazil and another in the remaining Portuguese-speaking countries. Proposers of the Agreement[who?] gave theSpanish language as a motivating example: Spanish has multiple variations, between Spain andHispanic America, both in pronunciation and in vocabulary, but it is under the same spelling norm, regulated by theAssociation of Spanish Language Academies.
The contents and thelegal value of the treaty have not achieved a consensus amonglinguists,philologists,scholars,journalists,writers,translators and figures of the arts, politics and business of the Brazilian and Portuguese societies. Therefore, its application has been the object of disagreements for linguistic, political,economic and legal reasons. There are even some who claim theunconstitutionality of the treaty. Some others claim that the Orthographic Agreement chiefly serves thegeopolitical and economic interests of Brazil.[citation needed]
Until the beginning of the 20th century, inPortugal as inBrazil, anorthography was used that, by rule, relied onGreek orLatinetymology to form words, e.g.pharmacia ("pharmacy"),lyrio ("lily"), anddiccionario ("dictionary"), among others.
In 1911, following theestablishment of the Portuguese republic, a wide orthographic reform was adopted – the Orthographic Reform of 1911 – which completely modified the face of the written language, bringing it closer to contemporary pronunciation. However, this reform was made without any agreement with Brazil, leaving both countries with two entirely different orthographies: Portugal with its reformed orthography, Brazil with its traditional orthography (calledpseudo-etimológica, "pseudo-etymological").
As time passed, theScience Academy of Lisbon and theBrazilian Academy of Letters led successive attempts to establish a common spelling between both countries. In 1931, the first agreement was reached; however, as vocabularies published in 1940 (in Portugal) and in 1943 (in Brazil) continued to contain some divergences, a new meeting was held that created the Orthographic Agreement of 1945. This agreement became law in Portugal, by Decree 35.288/45.[2] In Brazil, the Agreement of 1945 was approved by Decree-Law 8.286/45, but it was never ratified by theNational Congress and was repealed by Law 2.623/55, leaving Brazilians with the rules of the1943 agreement.
A new agreement between Portugal and Brazil – effective in 1971 in Brazil and in 1973 in Portugal – brought the orthographies slightly closer, removing the written accents responsible for 70% of the divergences between the two official systems and those that marked the unstressed syllable in words derived with the suffix-mente or beginning with-z-, e.g.sòmente (somente, "only"),sòzinho (sozinho, "alone"). Other attempts failed in 1975 – in part due to the period of political upheaval in Portugal, theRevolutionary Process in Progress (PREC) – and in 1986 – due to the reaction elicited in both countries by the suppression of written accents inparoxytone words.
However, according to proponents of reform, the fact that the persistence of two orthographies in thePortuguese language – the Luso-African and the Brazilian – impedes the trans-Atlantic unity of Portuguese and diminishes its prestige in the world – was expressed by the "Preliminary Basis for Unified Portuguese Orthography" in 1988, addressing criticisms directed toward at the proposal of 1986 and leading to the Orthographic Agreement of 1990.
For the development of the agreement, from 6 to 12 October 1990, the following delegations met at the Science Academy of Lisbon:
In addition to these, in the Preliminary Basis for Unified Portuguese Orthography of 1988, and in the Convention of the Orthographic Unification of Portuguese, formed in the Brazilian Academy of Letters inRio de Janeiro from 6 to 12 May 1986, the following were also present: Maria Luísa Dolbeth e Costa (Angola); Abgar Renault, Adriano da Gama Kury,Austregésilo de Athayde, Celso Cunha,Eduardo Portella, Francisco de Assis Balthar Peixoto de Vasconcellos and José Olympio Rache de Almeida (Brazil);Corsino Fortes (Cape Verde); Paulo Pereira (Guinea-Bissau); Luís Filipe Pereira (Mozambique);Maria de Lourdes Belchior Pontes and Mário Quarin Graça (Portugal).
In Article III, the Orthographic Agreement of 1990 scheduled its taking effect for 1 January 1994, following the ratification of all members. However, as only Portugal (on 23 August 1991), Brazil (on 18 April 1995), and Cape Verde have ratified the document, its complete implementation is pending.
On 17 July 1998, inPraia, Cape Verde, an "Amending Protocol for the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement" was signed that retracted the deadline from the original text, although it remained necessary for all signatories to ratify the agreement before it took effect. Once again, only the dignitaries ofBrazil,Portugal, andCape Verde approved this protocol.
In June 2004, the heads of state and government of theCommunity of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), gathered inSão Tomé and Príncipe, approved a "Second Amending Protocol for the Orthographic Agreement" that, apart from permitting the addition ofEast Timor, provided that, instead of ratification by all countries, ratification by three members would suffice for it to take effect.
Vasco Graça Moura, writer and former member of theEuropean Parliament, the best-known of the agreement's detractors, maintains that the Second Amending Protocol, like any other international convention, only obligates its implementation in each country if it is ratified by all signatories, something that has not yet occurred. In other words, only after all countries ratify the treaty are they obligated to implement the changes domestically after ratification by three members. The rationality of a legal treaty that obliges a country to adopt another treaty if approved by third countries is disputed. This argument of the 2004 ratification's purported illegality was questioned by lawyer and European Parliament member Vital Moreira.
Brazil ratified the Second Amending Protocol in October 2004, as did Cape Verde in April 2005. On 17 November 2006, São Tomé and Príncipe ratified the treaty and its amending protocols, fulfilling the provisions of this protocol.
Angola has not yet signed the agreement and has asked otherPALOP countries to support it in discussions on various points of that accord with Portugal.[3][4]
The adoption of the new orthography will cause changes in the spelling of about 1.6% of the words in the European norm (official also in Africa, Asia and Oceania) and about 0.5% in the Brazilian norm. The table below illustrates typical differences between the two orthographies currently in use.
According to the vocabulary developed in 2008 by the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics (Lisbon) from the database language MorDebe with 135,000 words, the percentage of words affected (simple words that are not inflected entries in dictionary or vocabulary) amounts to nearly 4% in the European standard. However, this figure includes both words that have changes in spelling, such as variants that are to be legally valid acrossCPLP.
The 1990 orthographic agreement proposes the elimination of the lettersc andp from the European/African spelling whenever they are silent, the elimination of the diaeresis mark (ü) from the Brazilian spelling, and the elimination of the acute accent from the diphthongséi andói inparoxytone words. As for divergent spellings such asanónimo andanônimo,facto andfato, both will be considered legitimate, according to the dialect of the author or person being transcribed. The agreement also establishes some common guidelines for the use of hyphens and capitalization, the former still to be developed and fixed in a common vocabulary.
It will also add three letters (K, W, and Y) to thePortuguese alphabet,[5] making it equal to theISO basic Latin alphabet.
| Former European orthography | Former Brazilian orthography | New orthography (1990 Agreement) |
|---|---|---|
| Defacto, o português éactualmente a terceira línguaEuropeia mais falada do mundo. | Defato, o português éatualmente a terceira línguaeuropéia mais falada do mundo. | Defa(c)to, o português éatualmente a terceira línguaeuropeia mais falada do mundo. |
| Não é preciso sergénio para saber que oaspectoeconómico pesa muito naprojecção internacional de qualquer língua. | Não é preciso sergênio para saber que oaspectoeconômico pesa muito naprojeção internacional de qualquer língua. | Não é preciso sergénio/gênio para saber que oaspe(c)toeconómico/econômico pesa muito naprojeção internacional de qualquer língua. |
| Não há nada melhor do que sair semdirecção, rumando paraNorte ou paraSul, para passar umfim-de-semanatranquilo em plenoAgosto. | Não há nada melhor do que sair semdireção, rumando paranorte ou parasul, para passar umfim-de-semanatranqüilo em plenoagosto. | Não há nada melhor do que sair semdireção, rumando paranorte ou parasul, para passar umfim de semanatranquilo em plenoagosto. |
| Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar depára-quedas pela primeira vez em plenovoo. | Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar depára-quedas pela primeira vez em plenovôo. | Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar deparaquedas pela primeira vez em plenovoo. |
| Area | Before 1990 | Agreement | Translation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Euro-African | Brazilian | |||
| Different pronunciation | anónimo | anônimo | Both forms remain | anonymous |
| Vénus | Vênus | Both forms remain | Venus | |
| facto | fato | Both forms remain | fact | |
| ideia | idéia | ideia | idea | |
| Silent consonants | acção | ação | ação | action |
| direcção | direção | direção | direction | |
| eléctrico | elétrico | elétrico | electric | |
| óptimo | ótimo | ótimo | optimal | |
| Diacritics | pinguim | pingüim | pinguim | penguin |
| voo | vôo | voo | flight | |
| Non-personal and non-geographical names | Janeiro | janeiro | janeiro | January |
Thisspelling reform was meant to go into effect after all signatory countries had ratified it, but at the end of the decade only Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal had done so, so the agreement could not go into effect.[6]
At the July 2004 summit of theCommunity of Portuguese Language Countries (including East Timor), São Tomé and Príncipe ratified the agreement, and a modification was made to the text, allowing the reform to go forward in those countries which had already ratified it, and accepting the official orthographies in the other countries as legitimate in the meantime; however, this was to happen after a transition period which was not defined.
The old orthographies continue to predominate in their respective countries until ratification of the 1990 agreement. Brazil changed on 1 January 2009.
The changes were accepted byEquatorial Guinea, which adopted Portuguese as one of its official languages on 13 July 2007.
InPortugal the change was signed into law on 21 July 2008 by thepresident allowing for a six-year transitional period, during which both orthographies co-existed. On 1 January 2012 the government adopted the spelling reform in official documents and in theDiário da República.[7][8] The transition period ended on 12 May 2015. As of January 2016, transitions have also ended in Cape Verde and Brazil, making the reformed Portuguese orthography obligatory in three of the nine lusophone countries.