The Portuguese Diaspora

Few European countries can have exported so many of their people, in proportion to their population, as Portugal. The diaspora — the body of Portuguese-descended communities scattered across the world — is estimated today at several million people, counting emigrants and luso-descendentes (people of Portuguese descent). For the history of the language, what matters is not only where they went but what they did to Portuguese: they kept it, transformed it, and, on returning, handed it back marked by contact with other tongues.

The great waves

Portuguese emigration falls into distinct cycles. The first, transatlantic, ran across the whole 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th, and its overwhelming destination was Brazil — by then independent, but linguistically a sister. Azoreans and Madeirans also made for the United States and Hawaii, and thousands of Madeirans were recruited for Guyana and the Caribbean.

The second cycle, European and continental, was concentrated between the 1950s and the oil crisis of 1973–74. Fleeing rural poverty and the Colonial War, over a million Portuguese left — many a salto, that is, clandestinely — above all for France, but also for Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Smaller streams ran in parallel to Venezuela, South Africa, Canada and Australia.

A third cycle, more highly skilled and more dispersed, opened with accession to the European Community (1986) and intensified with the economic crisis of 2008–2014, taking young graduates to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Angola and once again Luxembourg.

The main destinations

Country	Peak period	Predominant origin
France	1960–1974	Mainland (north and centre)
United States	19th c. and 1960–80	Azores, Madeira
Luxembourg	1970–present	Mainland, Madeira
Venezuela	1950–1970	Madeira
South Africa	1960–1980	Madeira, mainland
Canada	1953–1980	Azores, mainland

France hosts the largest community — several hundred thousand nationals and over a million people of Portuguese descent, concentrated in the Paris region. Luxembourg is the most singular case: the Portuguese make up roughly one sixth of the country’s total population, its largest foreign community. In the United States, Azorean settlement took root in New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island) and California, and Madeiran settlement in Newark’s Ironbound. Venezuela and South Africa drew chiefly Madeirans, who made their mark there in retail and catering.

The language in the diaspora

Far from Portugal, Portuguese came into prolonged contact with French, English, Spanish and African languages, and the results vary by generation. The first generation keeps Portuguese as its mother tongue, but takes in loanwords adapted to Portuguese phonology and morphology. The second and third generations often become heritage speakers: they understand more than they speak, and active command of the language tends to fade.

This hybrid speech — sometimes called, with a touch of irony, português dos emigrantes (emigrants’ Portuguese) — is not corruption but adaptation: a system that borrows from the dominant language the terms of the new life (work, bureaucracy, objects) and shapes them to its own rules.

Teaching Portuguese abroad

Maintaining the language among the second generation depends heavily on formal instruction. The Portuguese state runs a network of Portuguese teaching abroad (Ensino de Português no Estrangeiro, EPE), now coordinated by the Instituto Camões, with classes in schools and associations across dozens of countries. Alongside this, the vast web of clubs, folk-dance groups, sports societies and Catholic missions served for decades as an informal guardian of language and identity.

Return and its mark on the language

Emigration was not always permanent. Many returned — especially after 1974 — and brought home the linguistic habits of their host country. In parts of northern and central Portugal the speech of returnees from France became almost a stereotype, with its use of the Gallicism avec and of other imports.

Legacy

The diaspora made Portuguese a quiet but tenacious presence in dozens of countries where it holds no official status. It kept alive an emotional and cultural web linking villages of the interior to the suburbs of Paris, Luxembourg or Toronto, and fed into literature and the national imagination the ancient theme of departure — the saudade of those who stay and those who go. Eduardo Lourenço saw in this dispersal a structuring trait of Portuguese identity: a nation accustomed, ever since the Age of Discovery, to imagining itself beyond its own borders.