Select languages...
How Portuguese packages meaning
Portuguese grammar at a glance
Select a language above to see its architecture overview.
Common questions about Portuguese
What does the Portuguese present perfect (tenho falado) actually mean?
Not what English speakers expect. 'Tenho falado' means 'I have been speaking repeatedly', not 'I have spoken once'. In every other Romance language and in English, the present perfect marks a completed action with present relevance. Portuguese is the only one where it marks iterative or ongoing action. For a single completed event, use the preterite: falei.
What's the difference between tu, você, and o senhor?
Three levels of social formality. Tu is intimate — used in Portugal and parts of Brazil — and takes 2nd-person verb forms. Você is medium-formal in Portugal but the default 'you' in most of Brazil; it takes 3rd-person singular verb forms. O senhor / a senhora is formal: strangers, elders, professional contexts. Brazilian Portuguese has largely lost tu; European Portuguese still distinguishes all three.
Does Portuguese have grammatical gender?
Yes — every noun is masculine or feminine, and articles, adjectives, and past participles agree. 'O livro vermelho' / 'a mesa vermelha'. Endings give clues (-o usually masculine, -a usually feminine) with regular exceptions (a foto, o dia, a mão). Plural adds -s and the agreement carries through.
Is Portuguese pro-drop?
Yes. 'Falo português' is a complete sentence — the -o ending tells you the subject is 'I'. Subject pronouns appear only for emphasis, contrast, or disambiguation ('EU falo, ele não'). Brazilian Portuguese is becoming less pro-drop than European Portuguese, with subject pronouns appearing more often in casual speech, but both varieties still drop them more than English.
Why does 'a gente' take 3rd-person singular agreement in Brazil?
'A gente' literally means 'the people' — a feminine singular noun. When Brazilian Portuguese grammaticalized it as a colloquial 'we', the agreement stuck: 'a gente fala' (3SG) instead of 'nós falamos' (1PL). This is the same path English 'one' or French 'on' took, where a 3rd-person noun became a personal pronoun while keeping its original verb form.
Sources for Portuguese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Raposo, Eduardo Buzaglo Paiva et al. (2013). Gramática do Português. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
- Cunha, Celso & Cintra, Lindley (2017). Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo, 7th ed. Lisbon: Lexikon.
- Mateus, Maria Helena Mira et al. (2003). Gramática da Língua Portuguesa, 6th ed. Lisbon: Caminho.
- Perini, Mário A. (2002). Modern Portuguese: A Reference Grammar. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Thomas, Earl W. (1969). The Syntax of Spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.