Portuguese Language Origins

Portuguese boasts over 220 million native speakers, ranking it the world’s sixth most-spoken language – impressive! But where did this language begin? As a Romance language, Portuguese must have Latin roots. Let’s delve into its history.

Romans and Latin Influence

After the Romans took over the peninsula in the 3rd century BC, everyday Latin (aka Vulgar Latin), spoken by soldiers, traders, and settlers, spread throughout the region.

But, the languages spoken by the people who already lived there, which were much older and descended from Hispano-Celtic languages, left their mark. This is why Portuguese is also called “Língua Lusitana”, named after the Lusitanians, a Celtic tribe from Portugal whose language influenced Portuguese.

In other words, as the Romans and Latin arrived at the peninsula, the Lusitanians didn’t lose their language entirely but rather blended it with Latin to create something new. The prefix “luso” in words like “Lusophone” even hints at this Lusitanian influence.

Germanic Invasions

As the Western Roman Empire started to crumble (between the 5th and 8th centuries CE), the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by several Germanic tribes, namely the Suevi, Goths, and Visigoths. 

Although the invaders originally spoke Germanic languages, they quickly adopted the late Roman culture and Vulgar Latin dialects in the Iberian Peninsula. Over the next 3 centuries, they’d melt into the local cultures and leave their imprint on the language.  

As a result, several words with Germanic pedigree are still part of the Portuguese lexicon, for instance, “guerra” (war) or “frio” (cold).

The Moors

In the 8th century, the Moors and Berbers conquered parts of Iberia. Arabic became the language of government in these areas, heavily influencing the everyday speech of people living in southern and western Iberia.

For example, many Portuguese words that start with “al” come from Arabic. This includes words like “alface” (lettuce), “Algarve” (a region in Portugal), and “alameda” (avenue).

Even though Arabic culture and language had a big impact, most Christians in Iberia kept speaking a Latin-based language called Mozarabic.

Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, in the regions of southwestern Europe, the mishmash between Vulgar Latin and other ancient dialects matured into several Romance languages.

One of these Romance languages became known as Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese. It was primarily spoken in the western fringe of the Iberian Peninsula (a region equivalent to present-day Portugal and the autonomous region of Galiza) until the 14th century. 

Portugal’s declaration of independence in the 12th century triggered a series of events that led to the cultural separation between Portugal and the other regions in western Iberia, namely Galicia.

Two hundred years on, somewhere in the 14th century, the linguistic differences found in Portugal and Galicia were large enough for linguists to consider Portuguese as a separate language in its own right.

The Age of Maritime Exploration

In the spirit of exploration that began in the late 1300s, Portuguese explorers carried their language with them around the globe. This planted the seeds of Portuguese in far-flung regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Marriages between these explorers and local populations further spread Portuguese and embedded it in these new lands. Additionally, Christian missionaries played a key role in disseminating Portuguese and even contributed to the formation of new languages that blended Portuguese with local tongues.

By the mid-1500s, Portuguese had become a common language for trade (lingua franca) in both Asia and Africa. It wasn’t just for buying and selling goods – Portuguese became the go-to language for diplomacy, allowing local leaders to communicate with officials from other European countries involved in maritime trade.

This global journey wasn’t a one-way street for Portuguese. The language influenced and was influenced by others. For example, many Portuguese words are still found in the vocabulary (lexicon) of Malay today.

Even after official ties with Portugal were severed, Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in places like India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia managed to preserve the language to varying degrees.

The influence flowed both ways in the Americas as well. Many words from native South American dialects, particularly Tupi (once a common language among Brazilians), found their way into everyday Portuguese.

Similarly, the need to name new plants, animals, and objects encountered in Africa led to the adoption of many African words in Portuguese.

Modern and Contemporary Portuguese

Modern Portuguese dates back to the 16th century and coincides with the Renaissance period and the epic poetry of Luís Vaz de Camões.

Camões’ most acclaimed work is called “Os Lusíadas” and the author is to the Portuguese language what Shakespeare is to English.

Portuguese eventually became a sophisticated language reflecting its classical Roman and Greek origins. It is nowadays used for international and scientific communication in hundreds of universities across Lusophone countries.

Unsurprisingly, English has exerted a great deal of influence on Portuguese over the last decades, especially in the areas of technology and science (as new concepts are currently being developed mostly in Anglophone countries).

Lusophone literature is vast (from Brazil to Portugal to Angola to Mozambique) and has dozens of internationally acclaimed authors, for instance, Natalia Borges Polesso, Mia Couto, António Lobo Antunes, and of course the Nobel-awarded José Saramago, just to name a few.    

In 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language was founded in São Paulo (Brazil) which, with over 12 million inhabitants, is the city with the greatest number of Portuguese native speakers in the world. 

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