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Portuguese linguistic data
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Common questions about Portuguese
What linguistic data does this Portuguese page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system (including nasal vowels), morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Portuguese's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Portuguese data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What is the personal infinitive?
An infinitive that inflects for the implied subject's person and number — unique to Portuguese among Romance languages. 'É importante eles falarem' ('it's important that they speak'), where falarem is the infinitive falar plus 3pl ending -em. Disambiguates subordinate clauses without a fully finite verb.
How different are European and Brazilian Portuguese?
Mutually intelligible but with substantial divergence: phonology (Brazilian is more vowel-stable, European reduces unstressed vowels heavily), syntax (Brazilian fronts pronouns more, drops some inflection), and lexicon (different default words for trains, buses, kids, breakfast). Africa-Lusophone varieties tend to follow European patterns with local phonological influence.
Why does Portuguese have such a high similarity score with Spanish or Galician?
All three are West Iberian Romance, descended from Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula, with vocabulary overlap above 80%. Galician sits between Spanish and Portuguese both genetically and phonologically. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
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.