Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European family that originated in the Iberian Peninsula. Today it serves as the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, with co-official status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea and Macau. Communities of Portuguese speakers, collectively known as Lusophones, are found across all inhabited continents, reflecting the global impact of Portuguese exploration and settlement.
With around 250 million native speakers and an estimated 17 million second-language speakers, Portuguese has roughly 267 million speakers worldwide. It is one of the most widely spoken languages on Earth, ranking among the major European languages by native speakers and second only to Spanish among Romance languages. It is the first most spoken language in South America and the Southern Hemisphere, and the second most spoken in Latin America after Spanish. Portuguese is also one of the major languages of Africa and an official language in several international organisations, including the European Union, the African Union, Mercosul, the Organization of American States and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.

Historical Origins and Early Influences

The formation of Portuguese is rooted in the arrival of the Romans to the Iberian Peninsula in 216 BC, when Latin became the dominant language of administration, trade and settlement. As Latin spread through Roman towns and colonies, it merged with local Celtic dialects and substratum languages associated with early Atlantic European cultures. This fusion produced regional varieties of Vulgar Latin, laying the foundations for the Iberian Romance languages.
In ancient Latin sources the language is sometimes referred to as lusitana or latina lusitanica, referencing the Lusitanians, a pre-Celtic people inhabiting parts of present-day Portugal and western Spain who later adopted Latin. Following the collapse of Roman authority between the fifth and eighth centuries, Germanic groups such as the Suebi, Visigoths and Buri settled in the region. These populations adopted late Latin dialects and gradually integrated, leaving traces of Germanic vocabulary and personal names in the developing language.
The Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 introduced Arabic as the administrative language in the occupied areas. Even under Islamic rule, many inhabitants—known as Mozarabs—continued to speak Romance dialects. Contact with Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Berber languages introduced hundreds of loanwords, further diversifying the linguistic landscape of the peninsula.
Portuguese, like other European languages, later adopted numerous Greek terms, especially in scientific and technical contexts, often through Latin channels. This enrichment continued during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when scholars drew extensively on classical sources.

Development of Galician-Portuguese

The medieval ancestor of Portuguese is traditionally known as Galician-Portuguese or Old Galician, reflecting its origins in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal. The earliest written forms of this language appear in ninth-century Latin administrative documents that contain vernacular words and expressions. This early stage, called Proto-Portuguese, persisted until the twelfth century, when the County of Portugal asserted independence from the Kingdom of León.
Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Galician-Portuguese became widely used in legal documents, literature and lyric poetry across Christian Iberia. Just as Occitan was associated with troubadour poetry in France, Galician-Portuguese became a prestigious poetic language in the western Iberian Peninsula. The Portuguese alphabet also adopted certain digraphs from Occitan, including lh and nh, which remain integral to Portuguese orthography.
Portugal became an independent kingdom in 1139. In 1290, King Denis of Portugal founded the Estudos Gerais, the precursor to the University of Coimbra, and declared Portuguese—then referred to simply as the “common language”—to be used officially.

Global Expansion and the Age of Discovery

The second phase of Old Portuguese coincides with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Portuguese sailors and traders reached Africa, Asia and the Americas. The language spread rapidly through colonial settlements, trade ports and missionary efforts of the Catholic Church. By the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese served as a lingua franca in many parts of Asia and Africa, enabling communication among Europeans and local populations alike.
Mixed marriages between Portuguese settlers and local communities encouraged linguistic blending, contributing to the emergence of Portuguese-based creoles such as Kristang in Asia. In several places across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, Portuguese-speaking Christian communities maintained their linguistic heritage long after direct political ties to Portugal were severed.
The publication of the Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende in 1516 marks the end of the Old Portuguese period. Modern Portuguese emerged thereafter, shaped by waves of learned borrowings from Classical Latin and Ancient Greek during the Renaissance. Because many educated speakers were literate in Latin, scholarly vocabulary flowed naturally into both written and spoken Portuguese.

Linguistic Identity and Cultural Perception

Modern Portuguese retains the core features of Western Romance languages but also reflects centuries of contact with Celtic, Germanic, Arabic and other linguistic traditions. It is celebrated for its expressive poetic qualities. Writers such as Cervantes praised it as “sweet and gracious”, while the Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac famously described it as “the last flower of Latium, alive and beautiful”.
Portuguese is often referred to as the language of Camões, in honour of Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century poet whose epic Os Lusíadas occupies a central place in Portuguese literature. Today the language continues to evolve across diverse Lusophone regions, where cultural exchange, literature, music and migration continually shape its form and global influence.