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The Portuguese Language
History
Portuguese's origins date back to the conquest of Portugal by the Romans (3rd century BC), who brought the Latin language to the region establishing the basis of Portuguese as a Romance language. After the fall of the Roman Empire, spoken latin evolved in an intermediate language called "Lusitanian Romance", whose vocabulary was later influenced by Arabic (during the Arabs domination over Portugal). Portuguese was officially used in education in 1290, when it was set up the first University of Portugal.About 170 million people have Portuguese as their mother tongue, even if the country's population is greatly inferior to this number. Indeed, the majority of Portuguese-speakers live in Brazil (154 million people), who was conquered by Portugal in the 16th century, when the country flourished as a maritime power. Another 5 million speakers are found in some regions of Africa and Asia. The great maritime adventure resulted in an extremely rich travel literature and contributed to the spreading of the national language.
Dialcets
Portuguese is a language made up of many dialects, often unintelligible one with the other. For instance, in the Northern dialect there are regional words which people coming from other parts of the country don't understand.The most important variety of Portuguese outside Europe is found in Brazil, where they speak with a different intonation and use a slightly different vocabulary in comparison with the language of Portugal. For instance, there is a variation in the use of pronouns, as to address someone formally in Portugal they use "voce", which in Brazil is the informal, more colloquial "tu" (you).
The following example shows that Portuguese is not a dialect of Spanish, different from what many people think. The Portuguese for "car" is "carro", which in Spanish indicates the supermarket trolley. These two nouns can be misleading if, for instance, a Portuguese goes to a car dealer in Spain and he wants to see the latest model of "Seat's carro"!!! Apart from this funny example, the differences between Spanish and Portuguese are much deeper, as they affect vocabulary as well as syntax and grammar in general.