About Learning Portuguese with Berlitz

Portuguese is the national language of both Portugal and Brazil. In the former it is spoken by the entire population of 10 million people, including those in the Azores and on the island of Madeira. In Brazil it is spoken by virtually everyone save the country’s few hundred thousand Indians. As Brazil’s population continues to soar, so does the number of speakers of Portuguese. The figure for Brazil in the year 2000 was approximately 165 million, up from only 100 million 25 years earlier.

Portuguese is also spoken in countries and territories that were once colonies of Portugal. It is the official language of five countries in Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It is also spoken by small communities in Goa (western India), in East Timor (in Indonesia), and in Macao, which is now part of China.


The Portuguese of Brazil is slower and more measured than that of Portugal, but the Brazilians and Portuguese communicate with each other without the slightest difficulty. As in British and American English there are occasional differences in vocabulary. The word for boy is rapaz in Portugal but moço in Brazil; girl is rapariga in Portugal and moça in Brazil. Some Brazilian words are of Indian origin (e.g., abacaxi pineapple).

The Portuguese nasal vowels are indicated by the letters ãand õ. The ç functions as in French, while the combinations lh and nh correspond to the Spanish ll and ñ respectively. The letters k, w, and y are used only in foreign words. The letter j is pronounced as in French (not as in Spanish), as is the letter g before e and i. The h is always silent. Words ending in a (but not ã), e, o, m, or s generally stress the next-to-last syllable, while those ending in other letters stress the final syllable. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by an acute accent if the vowel has an open sound (açúcar sugar), and by a circumflex if the vowel has a closed sound (relâmpago lightning). The accent marks are also used to distinguish between words that would otherwise have the same spelling, as for example e, meaning and, but é, meaning is, and por, meaning by, but pôr, meaning to put.

José Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

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