The Spelling Reforms (1911, 1945, 1990)

The spelling of modern Portuguese is not a natural given: it is the product of deliberate decisions, taken by commissions and governments across the twentieth century. Three reforms define it — those of 1911, 1945 and 1990 — and their history is also the history of a language divided by an ocean and of the always-incomplete effort to keep it united in writing.

Before 1911: etymological spelling

Until the early twentieth century, writing Portuguese was an exercise in personal erudition. There was no official norm, and each author followed a spelling of etymological inspiration, which tried to reconstruct in writing the Latin or Greek origin of words. Hence forms that look startling today — pharmacia, orthographia, phleugma, sciencia, anno, abbade — with ph, th, rh, y and doubled consonants that said nothing about actual pronunciation.

1911: the republican reform

With the Republic proclaimed in October 1910, the new regime appointed a commission of philologists — among them Aniceto dos Reis Gonçalves Viana, the project’s chief author, with Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos and Leite de Vasconcelos — to fix an official spelling. The result, made law by decree on 1 September 1911, was the first systematic reform in the history of Portuguese, and it rested on a clearly phonetic principle: writing should follow pronunciation, not etymology.

The reform simplified spelling drastically: it removed the digraphs of Greek origin (ph → f, th → t, rh → r, ch with the value of [k] → c/qu), abolished y, reduced doubled consonants (except rr and ss) and regularised the use of accents. Pharmacia became farmácia; orthographia, ortografia.

1945: the Luso-Brazilian convention

Awareness of this split led the two academies — the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Letters — to negotiate a common spelling. A first agreement, in 1931, had limited effect. It was followed by the Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Convention of 1945, a meticulous text that Portugal adopted officially (Decree-Law no. 35,228 of December 1945) and which governed Portuguese spelling until the Agreement of 1990 took effect.

Brazil, however, signed but did not ratify the convention: its Congress did not approve it, and the country reverted to its own Orthographic Formulary of 1943. The outcome was paradoxical — an “agreement” that in practice enshrined two distinct official norms, Portuguese and Brazilian, for more than six decades. The most visible difference lay in the silent consonants: Portugal wrote acção, director, óptimo; Brazil wrote ação, diretor, ótimo.

1990: the Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language

Signed in Lisbon in 1990 by the seven then-Lusophone countries — Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe (later Timor-Leste too) — the new Agreement again pursued a unified spelling. Its application was repeatedly postponed; only after amending protocols did it take effect, in Brazil from 2009 and in Portugal with a transition period that ended in 2015.

Its main changes:

• dropping the silent consonants in Portugal (acção → ação, óptimo → ótimo), keeping only those that are pronounced (pacto, facto);
• abolition of the diaeresis in Brazil (lingüiça → linguiça);
• simplification of accents (pára → para; in Brazil, idéia → ideia, vôo → voo);
• new rules for the hyphen and for capitalisation.

Pre-1911	1911 / 1945 (EP)	Post-1990
pharmacia	farmácia	farmácia
orthographia	ortografia	ortografia
acção	acção	ação
óptimo	óptimo	ótimo
director	director	diretor

A debate that will not close

More than a technical matter, each reform was a political and cultural decision. That of 1990 in particular was, and remains, the object of lively controversy in Portugal, where many oppose it for moving spelling closer to Brazilian pronunciation. The history of these three reforms shows that orthography is a pact forever renegotiated — and that, in a language spoken by more than two hundred million people across several continents, writing the same way is as much a linguistic project as a political one.