European Portuguese

From the beginning of the XIX century (gaining independence by Brazil) and until the 70s of the XX century, the Portuguese language existed in two main versions: European and Brazilian. A similar situation with a certain standardized discrepancy between the norms of the same language between the norms of the mother country and (former) colonies is also observed in other European languages ​​transferred overseas during the colonization of the New World ( Spanish , English , French ). At the same time, despite its “originality,” the European norm of these languages ​​would not be called classical. The Portuguese language in Brazil , the Spanish language in Mexico and the English language in the USA rely, at least in phonetics, on the "classical" standards of the European norm of orthoepy of the period of the 16th – 17th centuries, that is, the beginning of colonization. Since then, the languages ​​of Europe have undergone significant phonetic changes, and the linguistic norms of the colony have remained preserved.

The Portuguese language of Europe changed phonetically in the 19th century. This is explained as internal spontaneous processes in the language, its large historically determined dialect fragmentation in comparison with the unified Brazilian norm, Gallicisms and Anglicisms . The Brazilian norm, especially in the south-east of the country, was influenced by the Spanish language of America. On the other hand, the European form is grammatically more conservative, while the Brazilian one contains a number of innovations.

• The development of reduced sound -e (resembling Russian -s ^{[ specify ]} ) in the ending on -de in words like “felicidade” “happiness”, lack of palatalization d (in Brazil, -de goes into -ji).
• The diphong transition ei> ai: feito sounds like a “fight”.
• Differences in the position of the pronoun and the presence of a long form of the verb in Brazil are explained by the Spanish influence.

In European Portuguese Portuguese, the pronoun Você is a strictly formal “you” (cf. French vous , Spanish. Usted ), tu “you” (as in Russian, Spanish, French) is used only in relation to relatives, friends, children. In the Brazilian Portuguese, tu is practically not used (only in the southern and northeastern parts of Brazil). Plural second person pronoun - vocês. The conjugation of verbs is therefore biased. A similar bias occurred in the Spanish language of Argentina.

• About Portuguese in the encyclopedia "Around the World"
• Description of the pronunciation rules of European Portuguese
• Description of the pronunciation rules of Brazilian Portuguese
• Tables with the pronunciation of each vowel and consonant letter in European Portuguese
• Article on variation in European Portuguese
• On gerund clauses of Portuguese dialects