The history of Portuguese — an overview

Portuguese is a Romance language: one of the tongues born from the breakup of the Latin spoken across the Roman Empire. Its history is that of a local speech in the far west of the Iberian Peninsula which, over more than two millennia, became a Romance language of its own, acquired writing and a standard, and was finally carried by sea to four continents. This section follows that arc — from Vulgar Latin to contemporary Portuguese — and this article is its map.

The major stages

It helps to begin with a minimal chronology, which the following articles develop.

• Substrate and Romanisation (3rd c. BC–5th c. AD). Before Rome, Hispania spoke pre-Roman languages — Celtic tongues, Lusitanian, and the enigmatic Vasconic in the north. The Roman conquest, begun in 218 BC, imposed Latin, but the earlier substrate left traces in the vocabulary and, possibly, in the phonetics.
• Germanic and Arabic superstrates (5th–13th c.). As the Empire fell, Germanic peoples — Sueves and Visigoths — settled in the region; from 711, the Islamic presence brought a vast lexical legacy. These are the superstrates that layer over an already rooted Latin.
• Galician-Portuguese (9th–14th c.). In the north-west a distinct Romance takes shape, Galician-Portuguese, the shared mother tongue of Portuguese and Galician and the vehicle of the great troubadour lyric of the songbooks.
• Middle Portuguese (14th–16th c.). With Portugal’s political independence and the shift of the centre of gravity to Lisbon and Coimbra, the language asserts its autonomy and modernises its phonology.
• Expansion and global spread (15th c. onward). The Discoveries carry Portuguese to Africa, Asia and the Americas; Brazil becomes, in time, the language’s largest demographic centre.
• Standard and orthography (16th–21st c.). From the first grammar to the modern spelling reforms, the written form of the language is progressively fixed.

How a language changes

Behind the dates lie regular processes of change. The most emblematic case in Portuguese is the loss of intervocalic Latin consonants, which opened hiatuses and gave rise to the nasal vowels that are so characteristic today.

Linguistic change is neither decay nor improvement: it is drift. Each stage in this section documents shifts of sound, grammar and vocabulary that, taken together, separate the Latin of Cicero from today’s Portuguese without there ever having been a single moment of rupture.

One language, many varieties

The history told here is, down to roughly the 15th century, common to every modern variety. What came afterwards — the Atlantic expansion — set European Portuguese apart from Brazilian and from the several African and Asian Portugueses. This section deals chiefly with the shared trunk; the branches are the subject of the Variants and Geography sections.

How to read this section

The articles are ordered chronologically and can be read in sequence, as a continuous narrative, or singly, as interest dictates. A good starting point is Vulgar Latin, the matrix of everything else, followed by Galician-Portuguese and the first documents, where the language first appears in writing. Readers wanting a dated overview will find a reference table in the chronology. Each article points, at its close, to its nearest neighbours.