The geography of Portuguese

Portuguese is today a truly global language. Spoken by some 260 million people, it is the official language of nine sovereign states spread across four continents — Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia — and the only Romance language with a strong presence in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is by far the most widely spoken. This section sets out where Portuguese is spoken, by how many, and under what very different conditions.

One language, four continents

The geography of Portuguese is the direct result of the maritime expansion that began in the 15th century. Once confined to a narrow strip of the Iberian west, the language followed navigators, settlers, missionaries and administrators to Brazil, the African coast, the Indian Ocean and the Far East. From that network of routes and trading posts came today’s map: a scattering of far-flung territories, hugely unequal in population, yet bound together by a single linguistic matrix.

Territory	Continent	Speakers (order of magnitude)
Brazil	South America	~210 million
Angola	Africa	~30 million
Mozambique	Africa	~30 million
Portugal	Europe	~10 million
Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe	Africa	a few million
Timor-Leste, Macau	Asia	minorities

Brazil alone accounts for more than four-fifths of all speakers, which makes Portuguese a language whose centre of gravity is American rather than European.

The Portuguese-speaking countries

Nine states have Portuguese as an official language: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Timor-Leste and Equatorial Guinea (which adopted it as a co-official language in 2010). They are united in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), founded in 1996. Alongside them, the territory of Macau, in China, retains the co-official status inherited from Portuguese administration.

The sociolinguistic situation varies enormously. In Portugal and Brazil, Portuguese is the mother tongue of almost the entire population. In the African countries it coexists with numerous national languages and with Portuguese-based creoles, serving above all as the language of schooling, administration and national unity — though the share of native speakers rises with each generation.

Its weight in the world

By number of native speakers, Portuguese ranks among the six or seven most spoken languages on the planet, alongside Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. Counting second-language speakers as well, it sits securely within the top ten. It is the most spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere and across South America, and one of the fastest-growing demographically, thanks to the youthful weight of Africa’s populations.

The diaspora

Beyond the territories where it is official, sizeable Portuguese-speaking communities are scattered across the globe, the fruit of centuries of emigration: in France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Venezuela, South Africa, Australia and Japan, among many others. This diaspora keeps Portuguese alive well beyond its official borders and sustains a vast network of teaching, press and associations.

How to read this section

The articles that follow look closely at each territory — beginning with the CPLP and the language’s two largest poles, Portugal and Brazil — and devote further chapters to the diaspora and to the dialect geography of Portugal.