Portuguese

About Portuguese

Portuguese is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and five other countries, with about 221 million native speakers. Most of them live in Brazil. Brazilian and European Portuguese understand each other well but differ in pronunciation, some everyday words and how people say "you".

In Brazil você is the everyday "you" and o senhor or a senhora is the polite form for older people. In Portugal friends say tu, and você can sound too direct with strangers, so people often use o senhor, a senhora or just the verb on its own. A tilde marks a nasal vowel, as in não (no). ç sounds like s, lh like the lli in "million" and nh like the ny in "canyon".

FamilyIndo-European, Romance
Native speakersabout 221 million (2019)
Official inPortugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Timor-Leste, Equatorial Guinea
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codespt (ISO 639-1), por (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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