Portuguese Conjunctions – All You Need to Know

Without conjunctions, we would sound rather clumsy and inarticulate: I like apples. I like pears. I don’t like bananas. No one speaks like that. 

In avoiding the choppiness of short sentences, conjunctions (aka linking words) allow us to express multiple ideas in elegant ways by sewing words, phrases, or clauses together. 

A few examples of Portuguese conjunctions are e, ou, mas, porque, quando, and se, among many others. Here’s a sentence containing some of these words:

Eu gosto de arroz e batatas, mas a Joana não aprecia nem um nem outro. I like rice and potatoes, but Joana prefers neither one nor the other.

In what follows, I will walk you through different categories of Portuguese conjunctions. I will keep Portuguese and English conjunctions side by side so that you can easily follow along.

Notice! Conjunctions are invariable words. This means that their morphology remains the same regardless of things like gender or number. Learn more about how gender and number affect other word classes like adjectives or determiners:
• Disentangling Gender with Portuguese Masculine-to-Feminine Spelling Patterns
• Forming the Plural in Portuguese: Singular-to-Plural Conversion Patterns to Keep an Eye On

Coordinating conjunctions

Coordinating conjunctions link words, phrases, and clauses of identical grammatical rank in a sentence. Here’s an example of the latter:

Eu pinto uma paisagem e ela toca guitarra. I paint a landscape and she plays guitar.

Notice that the clauses above are independent of each other and can therefore stand alone:

Eu pinto uma paisagem. Ela toca guitarra. I paint a landscape. She plays guitar.

There are different kinds of coordinating conjunctions. Let’s take a closer look at them.

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