Portuguese is ranked sixth among the world's languages in number of native speakers (over 200 million), and first in South America (186 million, over 51% of the population). It is also a major lingua franca in Africa. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th century as Portugal set up a vast colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macao in China. In that colonial period, many Portuguese creoles appeared all over the world, especially in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Portuguese is often nicknamed The language of Camões, after the author of the Portuguese national epic The Lusiads; The last flower of Latium (Olavo Bilac); and The sweet language by Cervantes.
History of the Language
Portuguese developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. The language began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century, and started to be used in written documents around the 9th century. By the 15th century it had become a mature language with a rich literature. In all aspects — phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax — Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin, with relatively minor influences from other languages.
Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the Romans brought with them the Roman people's language, Vulgar Latin, from which all Romance languages descend. Already in the 2nd century BC southern Lusitania was Romanized. Strabo, a 1st-century Greek geographer, comments in one of the books of his Geographia encyclopedia they have adopted the Roman customs, and they no longer remember their own language. The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near previous civilizations' settlements.
Between 409 A.D. and 711, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, the Iberian Peninsula was subjected to peoples of Germanic origin, known to the Romans as Barbarians. The Barbarians (mainly Suevi and Visigoths) largely absorbed the Roman culture and language of the peninsula; however, Lusitania's language and culture were free to evolve on their own during the Early Middle Ages, due to the lack of Roman schools and administration, Lusitania's relative isolation from the rest of Europe, and changes in the political boundaries of the Iberian peninsula. These changes led to the formation of what is now called Lusitanian Romance.
From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions. However, the population continued to speak their Romance dialects so that when the Moors were overthrown, the influence that they had exerted on the language was small. Its main effect was in the lexicon.
The earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language are administrative documents from the ninth century, still interspersed with many phrases in Latin. Today this phase is known as Proto-Portuguese (spoken in the period between the 9th to the 12th century).
Portugal was formally recognized by the Kingdom of Leon as an independent country in 1143, with King Afonso Henriques. In the first period of Old Portuguese - Portuguese-Galician Period (from the 12th to the 14th century) - the language gradually came into general use. Previously it had mostly been used on the Christian Iberian Peninsula as a language for poetry, just as Provençal was used out of Provence. In 1290, King Denis created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) and decreed that Portuguese, then simply called the Vulgar language should be known as the Portuguese language and should be officially used.
In the second period of Old Portuguese from the 14th to the 16th century, with the Portuguese discoveries, the Portuguese language spread to many regions of Asia, Africa and The Americas (nowadays, the great majority of Portuguese speakers live in Brazil, in South America). By the 16th century it had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. The spreading of the language was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people (also very common in other areas of the world) and its association with the Catholic missionary efforts, which led to it being called Cristão (Christian") in many places in Asia. The Nippo jisho, a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary written in 1603, was a product of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan. Alexandre de Rhodes' 1651 Dictionarium Anamiticum, Lusitanum et Latinum (Annamite-Portuguese-Latin dictionary), based off the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries, introduced the modern Vietnamese alphabet based on Portuguese orthography. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.
The end of Old Portuguese was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The period of Modern Portuguese (spanning from the 16th century to present day) saw an increase in the number of words of Classical Latin origin and erudite words of Greek origin borrowed into Portuguese during the Renaissance, which augmented the complexity of the language.
In March of 2006, the Portuguese Language Museum, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language was built in São Paulo, the city with the largest number of Portuguese speakers in the world.
Geographical Distribution
Portuguese is the first language in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, and the most widely used language in Mozambique. Portuguese is also one of the official languages of East Timor (with Tetum) and Macao S.A.R. of China (with Chinese). It is widely spoken, but not official, in Andorra, Luxembourg, Namibia and Paraguay. Portuguese Creoles are the mother tongue of Cape Verde and part of Guinea-Bissau's population. In Cape Verde most also speak standard Portuguese and have a native level language usage.
Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, including Montreal and Toronto in Canada; Paris in France; Asunción in Paraguay; and Boston, New Bedford, Cape Cod, Fall River, Providence, Newark, New York City, Orlando, Miami, Sacramento, Honolulu and Houston in the United States, Buenos Aires in Argentina,Uruguay, and Nagoya Hamamatsu in Japan, in Switzerland, Belgium, Liechenstein, Bermudas, some communities in India,Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Portuguese is spoken by about 187 million people in South America, 17 million in Africa, 12 million in Europe, 2 million in North America and 610,000 in Asia.
The CPLP or Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries is an international organization consisting of the eight independent countries which have Portuguese as an official language. Portuguese is also an official language of the European Union, Mercosul and the African Union (one of the working languages) and one of the official languages of other organizations. The Portuguese language is gaining popularity in Africa, Asia, and South America as a second language for study.
Portuguese is with Spanish the fastest growing western language, and, following estimates by UNESCO it is the language with the higher potentiality of growth as an international communication language in Africa (south) and South America. The Portuguese speaking African countries are expected to have a combined population of 83 million by 2050. The language is also starting to gain popularity in Asia, mostly due to East Timor's boost in the number of speakers in the last five years, and Macau is becoming the Chinese Mecca for learning Portuguese, where in early 21st century, the language use was in decline, today it is growing as it became a language for opportunity due to Chinese strategical cooperation with the Portuguese speaking countries.
language use was in decline, today it is growing as it became a language for opportunity due to Chinese strategical cooperation with the Portuguese speaking countries.
Posted by: ffxiv gil | 18 June 2010 at 08:54 AM