Portuguese as a foreign language

Get Portuguese translators and Interpreters now! Call 080-3753-1249, 081-1445-6164
E-mail: hello@novatiatranslations.com.ng

Portuguese as a foreign language

Portuguese is a mandatory subject in the school curriculum in Uruguay[52] and Argentina.[53] Other countries where Portuguese is taught at schools or is being introduced now include Venezuela,[54] Zambia,[55] the Republic of the Congo,[56] Senegal,[56] Namibia,[33] Swaziland,[56] and South Africa.[56]

Future
According to estimates by UNESCO, Portuguese is the fastest-growing European language after English and the language has, according to the newspaper The Portugal News publishing data given from UNESCO, the highest potential for growth as an international language in southern Africa and South America.[57] Portuguese is a globalized language spoken officially on five continents, and as a second language by millions worldwide.

Since 1991, when Brazil signed into the economic community of Mercosul with other South American nations, namely Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, Portuguese is either mandatory, or taught, in the schools of those South American countries.

Although early in the 21st century, after Macau was ceded to China and Brazilian immigration to Japan slowed down, the use of Portuguese was in decline in Asia, it is once again becoming a language of opportunity there, mostly because of increased diplomatic and financial ties with economically powerful Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, etc.) in the world.[58]

Portuguese dialects and Portuguese in the Americas

Ethnically diverse East Timor has Portuguese as one of its official languages
Você is used for educated, formal and colloquial respectful speech in most Portuguese-speaking regions. In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, você is virtually absent from the spoken language. In Portugal, it may be considered disrespectful to treat a stranger as você, so the pronoun is either replaced by the name of the person (or a title) or it is omitted, since the verbal conjugation allows the distinction between formal and informal treatment. Riograndense (or Gaúcho) Portuguese normally distinguishes formal from informal speech by verbal conjugation. Informal speech employs tu followed by third person verbs, formal language retains the traditional second person.

Conjugation of tu has three different forms in Brazil (verb “to see”: tu viste?, in the traditional second person, tu viu?, in the third person, and tu visse?, in the innovative second person), the conjugation used in the Brazilian states of Pará, Santa Catarina and Maranhão being generally traditional second person, the kind that is used in other Portuguese-speaking countries and learned in Brazilian schools.

The predominance of Southeastern-based media products has established você as the pronoun of choice for the second person singular in both writing and multimedia communications. However, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the country’s main cultural centre, the usage of tu has been expanding ever since the end of the 20th century (see,[59] a linguistic research on the topic in Portuguese), being most frequent among youngsters and a number of studies have also shown an increase in its use in a number of other Brazilian dialects.[60][61]

The status of second person pronouns in Brazil. Red indicates near exclusive use of você. Mauve indicates decidedly predominant use of tu, but with near exclusive third person (você-like) verbal conjugation. Brown indicates 50-50 tu/você variation, being tu nearly always accompanied by third person (você-like) verbal conjugation. Light blue indicates decidedly predominant to near exclusive use of tu with reasonable frequency of second person (tu-like) verbal conjugation. Yellow indicates balanced você/tu distribution, being tu exclusively accompanied by third person (você-like) verbal conjugation. Green indicates balanced você/tu distribution, tu being predominantly accompanied by third person (você-like) verbal conjugation.
Modern Standard European Portuguese (português padrão or português continental) is based on the Portuguese spoken in the area including and surrounding the cities of Coimbra and Lisbon, in central Portugal. Standard European Portuguese is also the preferred standard by the Portuguese-speaking African countries. As such, and despite the fact that its speakers are dispersed around the world, Portuguese has only two dialects used for learning: the European and the Brazilian. Some aspects and sounds found in many dialects of Brazil are exclusive to South America, and cannot be found in Europe. However, the Santomean Portuguese in Africa may be confused with a Brazilian dialect by its phonology and prosody.

Audio samples of some dialects and accents of Portuguese are available below.[62] There are some differences between the areas but these are the best approximations possible. IPA transcriptions refer to the names in local pronunciation.

Other countries and dependencies
Angola—Loudspeaker.svg Angolano (Angolan Portuguese)
Cape Verde—Loudspeaker.svg Cabo-verdiano (Cape Verdean Portuguese)
East Timor—Loudspeaker.svg Timorense (East Timorese Portuguese)
India — Damaense (Damanese Portuguese) and Goês (Goan Portuguese)
Guinea-Bissau—Loudspeaker.svg Guineense (Guinean Portuguese)
Macau—Loudspeaker.svg Macaense (Macanese Portuguese)
Mozambique—Loudspeaker.svg Moçambicano (Mozambican Portuguese)
São Tomé and Príncipe—Loudspeaker.svg Santomense (São Tomean Portuguese)
Spain—Oliventian Portuguese and other varieties sometimes controversially deemed as separate languages, such as Galician and Fala.
Uruguay—Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay (DPU)

Get Portuguese translators and Interpreters now! Call 080-3753-1249, 081-1445-6164
E-mail: hello@novatiatranslations.com.ng