On 5 May, the Lusophone community celebrates World Portuguese Language Day (Dia Mundial da Língua Portuguesa) which was officially established in 2009 by the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP) and later, in 2019, recognised by the 40th session of UNESCO’s General Conference. The aim of these festivities is to bring together people speaking one of the most widespread languages in the world and, thus, celebrate Lusophone cultures.
In fact, Portuguese is spoken by more than 265 million speakers on four continents and is even the most widely spoken language in the southern hemisphere. Portuguese is, hence, clearly an internationally spoken language whose community is constantly growing, so much so that it is currently in second place among the fastest-growing languages, the first one still being English.
While many might assume that the two standard varieties of Portuguese, European and Brazilian Portuguese are, like American and British English, very similar, they are, in fact, more distant. The most obvious difference lies in the use of the second-person pronoun. While tu and vós are used in Portugal, speakers of the Brazilian variety use você and vocês.
Another difficulty language learners encounter is that Portuguese has two verbs meaning to be, namely ser and estar. The first one refers to permanent states or conditions, whilst the latter is used to indicate temporary phenomena like, for example, moods or weather conditions.
To gain more insights into the Portuguese language and its cultural variety, we invite you to have a look at our Portuguese language section.