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Portuguese

Português

The infinitive that conjugates

A Romance language with nasal vowels and a verb form no other Romance language has.

FamilyProto-Indo-European › Italic › Latin › Romance › Western Romance › Portuguese
ScriptLatin
Speakers260M 236M native · 24M second
Weeks to a working level24 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover50.9% and the first thousand 76.8%
What sets it apart
  • The personal infinitive conjugates for person, which lets Portuguese say things other Romance languages need a subordinate clause for.
  • It has nasal vowels, marked with a tilde, which is the fastest way to tell written Portuguese from Spanish.
  • A Portuguese speaker reads Spanish easily. A Spanish speaker finds spoken Portuguese much harder, because Portuguese eats its unstressed vowels.
  • It is the official language of nine countries across four continents.
  • European and Brazilian spelling were formally aligned in a 1990 agreement that people are still arguing about.
  • Portugal holds about four per cent of its speakers.
What it opens

The original Atlantic version: Lisbon's swallowed vowels, fado, and a literature from Camões to Saramago. From here, Brazil is a listening exercise. Lisbon's light, Porto's wine, and a colonial-era network of ports from Goa to Macau whose stories only open in Portuguese.

Words with no translation

saudade

sow-DAH-deh

Longing for something loved and lost, which may never return

Portugal has a national day for it and a whole musical genre built around it.
The closest relative is Romanian dor, which is on this site too, and it is no coincidence: both are Latin.

cafuné

ka-foo-NEH

Running your fingers gently through someone's hair.

Brazil considered the gesture important enough to deserve its own verb. It belongs to couples, to mothers, to anyone whose lap you trust: tenderness with a name is tenderness you remember to give.

desbundar

des-boon-DAR

To shed your inhibitions and become who you are underneath.

To shed your inhibitions and become who you are underneath: what Brazil does collectively every February. The verb for the moment the shy accountant discovers he can samba.

desenrascanço

de-zen-rrash-KAN-so

Getting out of trouble with whatever is at hand, at the last possible moment

The Portuguese consider it a national skill and teach it by example.
A cousin of jugaad in Hindi and of a se descurca in Romanian, with one difference: desenrascanço is admired most when the mess was entirely avoidable.

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Portuguese parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Portuguese vs Portuguese (Brazil) → Portuguese vs Spanish → Portuguese vs French →

Portuguese in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →