Language Policy

Language policy is the body of deliberate decisions — taken by states, academies and international bodies — that regulate a language’s status, its written form and its teaching. In the case of Portuguese, the official language of nine countries and spoken across four continents, those decisions must be negotiated between separate sovereign states, which makes it one of the most interesting cases of language planning on a global scale.

The three fronts of planning

The classic theory of language planning, framed by Einar Haugen and Heinz Kloss and later systematised by Robert Cooper, distinguishes three complementary fronts. Applied to Portuguese, they line up as follows:

Front	Question it answers	Instruments in the Portuguese case
Status	What official functions does the language have?	Constitutions, laws, CPLP membership
Corpus	What written form and norm are fixed?	Orthographic agreements, vocabularies, grammars
Acquisition	Who learns it, and how?	Teaching networks, exams, cultural outreach

None of these fronts works in isolation: a spelling reform (corpus) takes effect only if it is adopted by law (status) and taught in schools (acquisition).

The status of Portuguese

In Portugal, Portuguese is the official language under Article 11 of the Constitution, which also charges the state with defending it as heritage. The same text delegates to ordinary law the protection of other languages — the basis for the recognition of Mirandese, whose linguistic rights were enshrined by Law 7/99 of 29 January, making it co-official in the municipality of Miranda do Douro.

Internationally, the standing of Portuguese rests above all on the CPLP — the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, created in 1996 — which brings together the states where Portuguese is official and makes the language its chief bond. It is within the CPLP that the great questions of shared language policy are now settled.

Standardization: the academies and the vocabularies

Fixing the written norm — corpus planning — traditionally falls to the academies. In Portugal, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (Academia das Ciências de Lisboa) publishes the reference vocabulary and dictionary; in Brazil, the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras) has, since 1981, issued the Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language (VOLP), the work that decides, word by word, what the official spelling is.

An orthographic vocabulary is not a dictionary: it does not define words but lists the admitted forms and their spelling, gender, plural and inflection. It is the practical arbiter of spelling doubts.

The Orthographic Agreement and the Common Orthographic Vocabulary

The 1990 Orthographic Agreement is the lusophone world’s largest undertaking in language policy: an attempt to unify spelling across all the countries, doing away with the two written norms (Lisbon’s of 1945 and Rio’s of 1943) that had prevailed until then. It was signed by every state and came into force gradually, completed in Portugal in 2015.

The text of the Agreement itself foresaw, as an indispensable complement, the compilation of a Common Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language (VOC) — “as complete as desirable and as standardising as possible.” Its execution was entrusted to the International Institute of the Portuguese Language (IILP), a CPLP body based in Praia, Cape Verde.

The logic of the VOC is telling of CPLP language policy: rather than imposing a single vocabulary from Lisbon, the IILP gathers each country’s National Orthographic Vocabularies (VOP) — each with its local terms, place names and loanwords — and aggregates them. Launched as a digital platform in the mid-2010s, the VOC thus gives written form to the principle of pluricentrism: one spelling, many national lexicons.

Outreach and teaching

The third front — acquisition planning — aims to enlarge the body of speakers. In Portugal this is the mission of the Camões Institute (Instituto Camões), which maintains lectureships, cultural centres and the network for teaching Portuguese abroad, and certifies command of the language through exams aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference. The symbolic crowning of this policy was UNESCO’s 2019 proclamation of World Portuguese Language Day, on 5 May.

Tensions and debates

Portuguese language policy is not without conflict. The adoption of the 1990 Agreement was, and remains, contested — especially in Portugal — by quarters that see it as a concession to Brazilian spelling. The very idea of orthographic unification runs up against pluricentric reality: spelling may converge, but pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax follow their own paths in each country. And some argue that the standardising effort should give greater voice to the African varieties, still under-represented in the reference works. These tensions are themselves part of how a living language, shared by many, works.