Gallicisms and Anglicisms

Alongside its inherited Latin core, Portuguese has taken in thousands of words from other languages over the centuries. Two of these currents stand out for their depth and duration: Gallicisms (borrowings from French — and, in the medieval phase, from Occitan) and Anglicisms (borrowings from English). The first dominated the Middle Ages and, above all, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second became the principal force from the twentieth century onward.

Gallicisms: two waves

French influence arrived in two great waves. The first accompanied, in the Middle Ages, the monastic reform of Cluny, the Burgundian dynasty and the chivalric and troubadour culture coming over the Pyrenees. From it survive words now wholly integrated, which few speakers feel as foreign: jardim (garden), manjar (to dine / a delicacy), monge (monk), vianda (victuals), homenagem (homage), trovador (troubadour).

The second wave, far larger, came when French was, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the international language of prestige — of the court, of fashion, of cuisine, of diplomacy. Through it entered terms of dress, of the table and of urban life, generally adapted to Portuguese spelling.

French	Portuguese	Domain
*chef*	*chefe* (boss)	work
*garage*	*garagem*	the city
*maquillage*	*maquilhagem* (make-up)	fashion
*abat-jour*	*abajur* (lampshade)	the home
*chic*	*chique*	fashion
*restaurant*	*restaurante*	the table

The most productive mark of this current is the suffix -agem, modelled on French -age, which settled as a living ending of Portuguese: garagem, bagagem (luggage), viagem (journey), paisagem (landscape), personagem (character), vantagem (advantage). There are also calques — literal translations of French phrases, such as fim de semana (weekend, on fin de semaine).

Anglicisms: from sport to the digital age

English began to leave its mark through maritime trade and the Industrial Revolution, but it was sport that threw the door wide open, in the early twentieth century. Futebol (from football), golo (from goal), penálti, córner and boxe became so thoroughly naturalised that their origin faded. From the same period come bife (from beef), clube, líder (leader), lanche (snack, from lunch), sanduíche and piquenique (picnic).

From the mid-twentieth century, and ever more forcefully in the age of computing and the Internet, a third wave set in, tied now to technology, economics and mass culture: software, hardware, e-mail, site, link, online, marketing, design, stress, feedback. Many of these still circulate in their English spelling — a sign that integration is recent and still incomplete.

How the language adapts

A borrowing rarely enters intact. Portuguese adjusts it on three levels:

• Spelling — futebol, clube, uísque (whisky), abajur replace the original form.
• Phonology — stress tends to gain a supporting vowel, and abajur settles as [ɐbɐˈʒuɾ] , with the final r characteristic of Portuguese.
• Morphology — the term takes native inflection and derivation: from click come clicar, cliquei, clicável; from format comes formatar.

Once a word acquires Portuguese inflection, it has ceased to be a foreign body and become part of the system.

Norm and attitudes

The inflow of loanwords — especially the digital Anglicisms — feeds an old debate between purism, which fears the language losing its character, and a more descriptive view, which sees in borrowing a normal and ancient mechanism of enrichment. History offers some comfort to the second position: jardim and bife were, in their day, neologisms as strange as software is now. The practical question is less how to avoid the loan than when the language already has an equivalent of its own.

In short

Gallicisms and Anglicisms are no accidents at the margin of the lexicon: they are two of the layers that, laid down over eight centuries, give Portuguese part of its present face. The difference between them is chiefly one of chronology — French marked the past, English marks the present — and the fate of both is the same: those that take hold end up becoming, simply, Portuguese words.