Why us?

Portuguese

Portuguese is the official language of Portugal and in the past, it was the language of all Portugal’s colonies. Nowadays, there are approximately 200 million Portuguese speakers worldwide, which makes it the sixth most spoken language on the planet. The majority of the native speakers live in Brazil. There are two main Portuguese dialects: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese and due to a significant distance between the countries, there are quite a few differences in pronunciation. Besides Portugal and Brazil, Portuguese is also spoken in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Macau and other countries.

Portuguese is also known as “the language of Camões”, a 16^th century Portuguese poet, whose mastery of verse has been often compared to Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, only 5% of all Portuguese speakers live in Portugal. At the same time, it is the fastest-growing European language in the world behind English.

Some would be surprised to learn that Portuguese was heavily influenced by Arabic during the period of Islamic Moors’ invasion to Portugal and Spain in the 8^th centure. Many words of Arabic origin remain in modern lexicon, e.g. almofada (cushion), azeitona (olive), garrafa (bottles), etc.

Interesting fact: until 2009, Portuguese had 23 letters, while ‘K’ ,’W’ and ‘Y’ were not part of the alphabet. In words, such as “kilogram”, the letter “K” used to be swapped out for “qu-“ – “quilograma”, while ‘W’ and ‘Y’ were only found in nouns of foreign origin. In 2009, a new “Orthographic Agreement” was signed between the Portuguese-speaking countries, which standardized spelling forms across multiple variations of Portuguese and also introduced the letters ‘K, ‘W’ and ‘Y’.