Middle Portuguese

Middle Portuguese is the transitional stage that links medieval Galician-Portuguese to Classical Portuguese, falling broadly between the mid-14th and the mid-16th centuries. It is a hinge period: the language sheds the archaic look of the songbooks and settles many of the features we recognise as modern — from the reduction of nasal hiatuses to the placement of pronouns — while becoming, for the first time, an object of study and of standard-setting.

Where it fits

Periodisations differ from author to author, but the broad outline is agreed: after the great troubadour lyric of the 13th and 14th centuries, Galician-Portuguese splits into two branches (see The parting of Galician and Portuguese), and the southern branch — Portuguese — undergoes a phase of rapid change through the 15th century and the first half of the 16th. The period is conventionally closed around 1536–1550, bounded on one side by the first grammars and on the other by the start of the overseas expansion that would carry the language across the world.

The end of the nasal hiatuses

The most visible legacy of Galician-Portuguese was the set of vowels and hiatuses born from the loss of intervocalic Latin /n/ and /l/. In Middle Portuguese many of these sequences contract and shed their nasality, giving the language a profile closer to today’s.

At the same time, three distinct medieval endings converge in the singular on -ão, even though the plurals preserve their separate origins — hence the apparent irregularity that still puzzles learners today:

Latin	Medieval	Modern singular	Modern plural
CANE(M)	cã	cão	cães
RATIONE(M)	razõ	razão	razões
MANU(M)	mão	mão	mãos

The sibilants begin to merge

Galician-Portuguese distinguished four apical and dorsal sibilants — the affricates c/ç [ts] and z [dz] , opposed to the fricatives -ss- [s] and -s- [z] — besides the pair x / ch. During Middle Portuguese the affricates lose their stop element and, in the centre and south of the country, this whole system begins to collapse into a single voiced/voiceless s pair; ch merges with x as [ʃ] . The distinction survives only in the North and, to this day, in Mirandese — a living witness to the medieval state.

The morphology settles

Verb inflection is reorganised too. The second person plural loses the intervocalic -d- of its endings, a process that runs through the 15th century:

It is also in this phase that patterns of pronoun placement firm up and new courtesy forms of address gain ground (such as vossa mercê, the seed of later você) — a development that would only mature later.

The written page

The 15th century and the early 16th leave us an abundant corpus in prose and verse: the historiography of Fernão Lopes, the courtly poetry gathered in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral (1516), and the theatre of Gil Vicente, active from about 1502 to 1536. Alongside this, Renaissance humanism brings a wave of Latinisms and re-latinised spellings that bring the Portuguese word visually back toward its Latin source.

The language becomes an object of standard

The feature that best marks the close of the period is the birth of metalinguistic reflection. In 1536, Fernão de Oliveira publishes the Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, the first grammar of Portuguese; in 1540, João de Barros prints his Grammatica da Língua Portuguesa, together with the Diálogo em louvor da nossa linguagem. For the first time Portuguese is described, defended and proposed as a standard — a gesture inseparable from the imperial consciousness of the age.

Legacy

Out of Middle Portuguese came a language substantially modern in its phonology, morphology and spelling — and, above all, a language described and standardised, ready for the next step: the global expansion and spread that, from the 16th century onward, would make Portuguese a language of several continents.