Portuguese language,Romance language that is spoken inPortugal,Brazil, and other Portuguese colonial and formerly colonial territories.Galician, spoken in northwesternSpain, is closely related to Portuguese.

Portuguese owes its importance—as the second Romancelanguage (afterSpanish) in terms of numbers of speakers—largely to its position as the language of Brazil, where in the early 21st century some 187 million people spoke it. In Portugal, the language’s country of origin, there are more than 10 million speakers. It is estimated that there are also some 8 million Portuguese speakers in Africa (Angola,Cabo Verde,Equatorial Guinea,Guinea-Bissau,Mozambique, andSao Tome and Principe). Portuguese is also spoken by about 678,000 people in theUnited States, with largecommunities of speakers in the states ofMassachusetts andRhode Island.

Brazilian Portuguese varies from European Portuguese in several respects, including several sound changes and some differences in verb conjugation and syntax; for example, object pronouns occur before the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, as in Spanish, but after the verb in standard Portuguese. Despite differences inphonology, grammar, andvocabulary, Portuguese is often mutually intelligible withSpanish.There are four main Portuguesedialect groups, all mutually intelligible: (1) Central, orBeira, (2) Southern (Estremenho), includingLisbon,Alentejo, andAlgarve, (3)Insular, including thedialects ofMadeira andthe Azores, and (4)Brazilian. Standard Portuguese was developed in the 16th century, basically from the dialects spoken from Lisbon toCoimbra. Brazilian (Brasileiro) differs from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal in several respects, insyntax as well as phonology and vocabulary, but many writers still use an academic metropolitan standard. A Judeo-Portuguese is attested in 18th-centuryAmsterdam andLivorno (Leghorn, Italy), but virtually no trace of that dialect remains today.

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Typical of the Portuguesesound system is the use of nasal vowels, indicated in the orthography bym orn following the vowel (e.g.,sim ‘yes,’bem ‘well’) or by the use of a tilde (∼) over the vowel (mão ‘hand,’nação ‘nation’). Ingrammar its verb system is quite different from that of Spanish. Portuguese has a conjugated or personal infinitive and a future subjunctive and uses the verbter (Latintenere, Spanishtener ‘to have,’ ‘to hold’) as anauxiliary verb instead ofhaver (Latinhabere, Spanishhaber ‘to have’; in Spanish used only as an auxiliary verb).

Until the 15th century, Portuguese and Galician formed one single linguistic unit, Gallego-Portuguese. The first evidence for the language consists of scattered words in 9th–12th-century Latin texts; continuous documents date from approximately 1192, the date assigned to anextant property agreement between the children of a well-to-do family from the Minho River valley.

Literature began to flourish especially during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the soft Gallego-Portuguese tongue was preferred by courtlylyric poets throughout theIberian Peninsula except in theCatalan area. In the 16th century, Portugal’s golden age, Galician and Portuguese grew farther apart, with the consolidation of the standard Portuguese language. From the 16th to the 18th century, Galician was used only as a home language (i.e., as a means ofcommunication within the family). Toward the end of the 18th century, it was revived as a language ofculture. In the 21st century, with Spanish, it is an official language of thecomunidad autónoma (“autonomous community”) ofGalicia. In 2008 the Portuguese parliament passed an actmandating the use of a standardized orthography based on Brazilian forms.