Besides Spanish and Galician, Portuguese is a ibero-romanic language.
Due to the colonial power Portugal once had the Portuguese Language is spread world wide. Aside from the motherland Portuguese is the primary language of Brasil, some African countries and is spoken in some parts of South-East Asia. read more...
Apart from 210 million native speakers world wide about 30 million people use Portuguese as secondary language.
The evolution of Portuguese toke place parallel to Spanish and under same conditions and influences. The Roots of the Portuguese language are lying in the Latin language, better to say in the vulgar or spoken Latin. As well as Spanish Portuguese was influenced by conquests of the Visigoths and the Arabs by whom the thesaurus and grammar was adopted.
Despite of all commonalities the development of Portugueses, as well as Galician, took place isolated from Spanish. The Gerund is used more often in the Portuguese language as in Spanish.
Meassured on the spread of Potuguese the are a lot of dialects, the so called „sotaque“.
The phonetic structure of Portuguese is quiet complex. It consists of 11 different vowels. Like in French related words are phonetically matched. In general the sound structure is softer than in Spanish.
As the only Romanic language Portuguese has a personal infinitive.
Otherwise the grammar is similar to other Romanic languages.
Two specialties descent from Latin - the „Futurum exactum“ and the pluperfect (past perfect).
