To be fair, Spanish does have more native speakers—a total of million speakers , in fact. However, French and German, other popular languages with students, have significantly fewer speakers. French has around 76 million native speakers , while German has nearly 79 million native speakers in fact, French has over twice as many learners as native speakers!
That means Portuguese has significantly more native speakers than some of the most widely studied foreign languages! While the language is most well-known for being spoken in these countries, you can find it in some other, more unexpected places.
Despite being the seventh most widely spoken language in the world as of , it did not crack the top ten most studied languages in United States universities. So while a lot of people speak the language, not many are studying it in the US. This means that studying Portuguese can help set you apart from the masses studying more popular languages and allow you to interact with a huge population that other language students cannot communicate with.
Perhaps because it is overshadowed by its super-popular sibling, it can be difficult to find in-person Portuguese courses. But thankfully, there are lots of websites to learn Portuguese and online Portuguese courses that can help hook eager learners up with the finest information. Stay tuned to FluentU for an authentic way to learn the language—currently in the works! FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
And you will soon be able to use it for Portuguese learning. So sign up today or download the app for updates and Portuguese learning! Since these languages have similar origins, you will notice some overlap in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.
Therefore, if you have studied another Romance language, you are likely to find learning Portuguese much easier than learning a language from a different family. Because Portuguese is similar to other Romance languages, learning it can also help set you up for success should you choose to study another Romance language down the road.
Since this is one of the most popular language families among students, any advantage you can gain is a huge bonus! His interests include reading, writing, politics, and anything sweet.
Dylan lives in New York City. Dylan lebt in New York City. I cuccioli soprattutto. Dylan mora em Nova York, mas foi educado em diferentes cidades nos Estados Unidos. O seu preferido? Portuguese is among the 10 most spoken languages in the world, but only 5 percent of its speakers live in Portugal.
Read on for some fun facts about the language, starting with a bit of history. Portuguese is a Romance language that developed over 2, years ago — in the third century BCE — when the Romans arrived at the Iberian Peninsula, a European peninsula primarily comprised of modern-day Portugal and Spain.
During the collapse of the Roman Empire between CE and CE, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic tribes, who both brought their languages to the region and adopted some of the Vulgar Latin dialects and culture. Today, modern Portuguese has between and words of Arabic origin. In , Portugal was recognized as an independent kingdom. In , the king of Portugal, Denis, created the first university in Lisbon and declared that the spoken language of Vulgar Latin be used and that it should be called Portuguese.
Even though they are two separate languages, Galician and Portuguese are similar, with some speakers describing the difference between them as akin to the difference between American and British English. During the period of Portuguese colonialism of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese language was brought to many regions of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Local officials and Europeans of all nationalities used Portuguese as a lingua franca a common language to facilitate communication. Portuguese was also used by Roman Catholic missionaries in Asia, and today there is a cultural presence of Portuguese in parts of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia.
No other country in the Americas even comes close to that number, but there are a few places with significant Portuguese-speaking contingents.
The United States is home to , Portuguese speakers and Canada has , In addition to Brazil, a few South American countries have Portuguese-speaking pockets, including Argentina 58, , Paraguay , , Uruguay 30, and Venezuela , The one you decide to learn will depend on your individual goals and interests.
There are populations of Portuguese speakers spread across Europe. In fact, France is not far behind Portugal with , Portuguese speakers. Germany, Spain and Switzerland each have about , speakers, give or take a few thousand.
There are quite a few Portuguese speakers in Africa, largely due to colonialism. Angola is home to around 18 million speakers and Mozambique has roughly 13 million.
Guinea-Bissau and South Africa each have a few hundred thousand speakers as well. In Asia and Oceania, you can also find significant Portuguese-speaking populations. There are close to , speakers in both India and Japan, and just shy of 49, in Australia.
Planning an upcoming vacation to Brazil? Although there are some regional differences, there are no Portuguese dialects in Brazil, he explains. Moreover, Brazil is known to have low levels of English language skills, another advantage for speakers of Portuguese who are interacting with Brazilians. No matter what career path you choose, you will multiply your chances for success if you speak these two languages as they cover all of South America plus many other places in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Read More. Those interested in world music will greatly benefit from knowing Portuguese. Over the last five centuries, Portuguese, African, and Amerindian traditions, instruments, harmonies, dances, rhythms, and other musical elements have been mixed to form unique sounds and rhythms such as samba and bossa-nova. The astonishing richness of literature in Portuguese—everything from The Lusiads , the greatest epic poem of the European Renaissance, to modern Brazilian narrative and poetry—is considered by some to be the best-kept secret in the Western Hemisphere.
Brazil is one of the major tourist destinations in South America. Knowing the language of the country you visit provides the tourist with choices not available to monolinguals.
The Council has also compiled on their site a partial list of other organizations which offer ancestry-based awards to Portuguese-American students. Sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, the Society offers scholarships to high-school members for university studies and travel Spanish-speaking countries, as well as honoraria and possible publication in Albricias.
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