Portuguese: A Rising Language

Portuguese: A Rising Language

Language is the connection between people. No matter how far apart, languages have the potential to bring people from all around the world together. Languages have been around from the earliest years of man, and have transformed greatly through semantics and phonology. Languages have also allowed the current era to connect to the past and somewhat understand how life really was through documents and texts by scribes and other literate peoples. The Portuguese language has not been distinguished for as long as some other languages; however, it has become largely used in many different regions and countries throughout the world. Portuguese is a language of romance and vividness that contains much from the past in form and word origin, but also consists of many lexical and phonemic changes.

Portuguese is one of the five known Romance languages around the world that are derived from Vulgar Latin. The Romance language group is comprised of Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian and Italian. Portuguese is of course the official language of Portugal, as well as "Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe" (Portuguese Language). Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe comprise most Portuguese speakers, however North America contains a good amount of speakers and many Portuguese creole speakers can be found in Asia, India and Oceania (Portuguese Language). Portuguese is one of the few languages that are so widely distributed around the world. It ranks as the 5th most spoken first language in the world as of recent studies. In Europe, Portuguese is noted as the 3rd most spoken language and because of its dominance in Brazil, it is the most widely spoken language in South America (Languages). It has become the fastest growing language of Europe alongside Spanish because of the colonization during the years of imperialism. As a result, Portuguese plays a large role in many African civilizations as a key language with a great amount of influence.

The Portuguese language developed from Latin around the same time as the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 3rd century A.D. During this time is when it is believed that Portuguese diverged from Latin and the rest of the Romance languages (General Overview). After the Moorish invasion in the 8th century of the Iberian Peninsula, Mozarabic became a common language that was the result of Arabic and Roman dialects (General Overview). This is why modern Portuguese still has a large number of words of Arabic origin from lexicon effect relating to food, agriculture and crafts while there are no other evident cognates in any other Romance languages (Languages). The only exception is Spanish, which seems to be reasonable considering Spanish and Portuguese are neighboring languages. The earliest surviving records of a distinct Portuguese language are from documents containing Latin texts in the 9th century (General Overview). Vulgar Latin gained local characteristics in the western part of the Iberian Peninsula where Portuguese would later form. In 1290, King Diniz decreed that Portuguese was to be preferred to Latin and in 1296; the Portuguese language was adopted by the royal chancellery and began to be used in poetry, and writing laws and notaries (Portuguese Language). Portuguese started to become a more recognized language throughout the peninsula. The renaissance added many borrowed words from classical Latin and ancient Greek which resulted in a greater complexity of Portuguese lexicon (Languages). Also, the printing press helped propel standardization of the southern variant of Galician-Portuguese, which is the official Portuguese language, across the western part of the Iberian Peninsula.

Portuguese has become a part of life for many different cultures. By the 16th century, Portuguese became a lingua franca in Asia and Africa to be used for colonial administration, trade, and communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities (Portuguese Language). The language is still growing today as Christian communities have created several Portuguese creoles in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Portuguese Language). This is why there is a large Portuguese speaking population in African and Asia nowadays. Author Earl Fitz notes that, "In the 1960's when the hegemony of old Portuguese literary canons gave way to the newly emergent masters of Brazil (Amado, Rosa, Lispector, and Machado de Assis)...young writers from the old colonies were finding not only their voices but also voices that reinvigorated and reenergized the language and vision of their European forebears" (439). Portuguese continues to distinguish itself and move in a forward direction as a language. As a result of this, there are more and more speakers of the language in various regions. In the world, there are about "190 million speakers are in South America, 17 million are in Africa, 12 million are in Europe, and 2 million and .61 million are in North America and Asia respectively" (General Overview). According to UNESCO, the Portuguese language has the highest growth potential in southern Africa and South America as an international communication language. Furthermore, Portuguese speaking African countries are expected to have a combined population of 83 million by 2050 (Portuguese Language).

Portuguese is part of a family that influences a large part of our world. As noted earlier, Portuguese, along with Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian, is derived from Vulgar Latin and is referred to as a Romance language. The Language family is the Latin branch and the languages within can be called Italic or Romance languages. Within the language branch, Portuguese and Italian are distinguished as the closest modern major languages to Latin, as French has moved the furthest from Latin in pronunciation because of its lasting influences from other languages (Languages). French is only relevant to Latin