Portuguese originated from the Latin spoken by the romanised Celts who inhabited Galicia over 2000 years ago.
The Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC and conquered the territory. During the fifth and the eighth century AD this territory was attacked and eventually conquered, in turn, by the Suevi, the Visigoths and later by Moors. All these peoples influenced the language spoken by the inhabitants and contributed to the creation of Proto Portuguese, a language spoken on this territory between the ninth and the twelfth century. The earliest records of Portuguese language are several administrative documents which date back to the ninth century AD.
Old Portuguese was the language spoken by the Portuguese people between the twelfth and the sixteenth century. In this period Portugal became an independent country (1143), the first university was created (Estudo Geral is Lisbon, 1290) and the official language (called "Vulgar language" until then) got the name of "Portuguese language".
Portugal's geographic discoveries from the 15th and the 16th century led to the establishment of a colonial empire. Consequently, the Portuguese language spread across the colonies, from the Americas to Africa and Asia.
Nowadays, Portuguese is spoken by over 200 million people and ranks sixth in the top of the most widely spoken languages. Over 50% of the South American population speaks Portuguese and it is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique. It is also one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea (with Spanish and French), of the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau (with Chinese) and East Timor (with Tetum).
Portuguese is written with the Latin alphabet and it makes use of several diacritical marks as: the acute, the grave and the circumflex accent, the tilde and the cedilla. Portuguese has several dialects but they are mutually intelligible. Between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese there are very few differences and they reside mainly in vocabulary and less in pronunciation and syntax.
Ioana Mihailas is a linguist for Lingo24 Translation Services, a top UK translation company.
Source: www.ezinearticles.com
