The 1990 Orthographic Agreement

The 1990 Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language (in Portuguese, Acordo Ortográfico de 1990, or AO90) is the international treaty that established a common spelling for written Portuguese across every country that has it as an official language. Signed in Lisbon on 16 December 1990 by representatives of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe — joined later by East Timor after its independence — it is the most ambitious, and by far the most contested, of the reforms that reorganised the writing of Portuguese over the twentieth century.

An agreement to unify spelling

Ever since the norms parted ways early in the century — Portugal’s 1911 reform was not followed by Brazil — Portuguese lived for decades with two official orthographies. Where Portugal wrote acção and directo, Brazil wrote ação and direto; where Lisbon spelled húmido, Rio spelled úmido. Successive attempts at convergence (1931, 1943, 1945, 1971, 1973) narrowed the divergences without ever erasing them.

The AO90 grew out of the political will for one spelling for one language, sustained by the idea that a single norm would strengthen the international standing of Portuguese and ease the circulation of books and documents across the Lusophone world. To achieve this, the text gives weight, at several points, to the phonetic criterion — you write what you pronounce — over the etymological criterion that had dominated the Portuguese tradition, in which spelling preserved traces of Latin origin even when they were silent.

According to the Explanatory Note that accompanies the treaty, the reform touches only a small fraction of the lexicon — on the order of 1.6% of the words used in Portugal and about 0.5% of those used in Brazil. The asymmetry is not accidental: on each side of the Atlantic, the bulk of the change falls on different phenomena.

Silent consonants

The most visible change in Portugal is the dropping of unpronounced consonants in the clusters cc, cç, ct, pc, pç and pt. Where the c or p ceased to be pronounced, it ceases to be written.

Before 1990	After 1990	Pronunciation
*acção*	*ação*	ɐˈsɐ̃w̃
*óptimo*	*ótimo*	ˈɔtimu
*adopção*	*adoção*	ɐduˈsɐ̃w̃
*baptismo*	*batismo*	bɐˈtiʒmu

The principle has an important brake, however: the consonant is kept where it is articulated. European Portuguese therefore still writes facto, pacto, compacto, convicto, rapto, núpcias and egípcio, and keeps the double c in ficção, fricção or convicção, where the first c is sounded. It is this dependence on pronunciation that explains why the same word can end up spelled differently on the two sides of the Atlantic (see below).

In some cases, variation in pronunciation itself gives rise to optional spellings, recorded side by side in the vocabularies: sumptuoso / suntuoso, or concepção / conceção, depending on whether the speaker articulates the consonant or not.

Accents, the hyphen and other changes

The remaining changes are spread across several areas:

• Accents removed. The circumflex disappears from verb forms ending in -eem (lêem → leem, vêem → veem, crêem → creem, dêem → deem) and from paroxytones in -oo (vôo → voo, enjôo → enjoo). Gone too are the differential accents that once distinguished pairs such as pára (verb) and para (preposition), now both para. A few survive out of necessity: pôr (verb) / por (preposition) and pôde (past) / pode (present).
• The hyphen. The rules were extensively rewritten. When a prefix ends in a vowel different from the one that begins the second element, the two are joined (autoestrada “motorway”, aeroespacial); when the vowels are the same, the hyphen stays (micro-ondas “microwave”, contra-almirante, anti-inflamatório). With prefixes ending in a vowel before r- or s-, the consonant doubles: antirreligioso, antissocial, contrarregra. Everyday phrases lose their hyphens (fim-de-semana → fim de semana “weekend”).
• Capitals. The names of months and seasons are now written in lower case (janeiro, primavera), as was already the practice in Brazil, and the use of capitals in titles and forms of address is relaxed.
• The alphabet. The text formally recognises the letters k, w and y, fixing the alphabet at 26 letters — not because new sounds are introduced, but because these letters are admitted in foreign proper names, symbols and loanwords.

Coming into force and adoption

Although the text dates from 1990, its application was slow and uneven. The decisive instrument was the Second Modifying Protocol (2004), which allowed the agreement to enter into force with the ratification of just three states, rather than the unanimity originally required.

• Brazil — Adopted it by decree from 1 January 2009, with a transition period in which the two spellings coexisted; it became mandatory in 2016.
• Portugal — Council of Ministers Resolution no. 8/2011 set its application in government and schools from the 2011–2012 academic year, with a six-year transition. The official gazette, the Diário da República, began publishing under the AO90 in 2012.
• The other states — Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe ratified the agreement; Angola and Mozambique signed it but, to date, have not completed ratification, so its standing across the Lusophone world remains incomplete.

The controversy

In Portugal the AO90 provoked — and still provokes — intense opposition, especially among writers, linguists, translators and publishers. The main objections fall into three kinds.

The first is one of principle: by preferring pronunciation to etymology, the reform is said to erase the memory of a word’s origin and the visible links with the other Romance languages (ação drifts away from action, azione, acción). The second is one of effectiveness: by tying spelling to what is articulated, the agreement creates new optional forms and fails to unify — words still exist that are written differently in Portugal and Brazil. The third is legal and procedural: critics such as António Emiliano disputed the validity of bringing the agreement into force through the Second Protocol, and various petitions and citizens’ initiatives have called for its revision or suspension.

There was, and is, practical resistance: some newspapers, publishers and authors refused to adopt the new spelling, and the debate over a possible revision of the text has never quite closed.

An incomplete agreement?

The central paradox of the AO90 is that, by anchoring writing to pronunciation, it codified some of the very differences it set out to erase. Where a consonant is articulated on one side of the Atlantic and not the other, the spelling diverges — exactly the outcome that unification sought to avoid.

Despite the criticism, the AO90 is today the official norm in Portugal and Brazil, taught in schools and followed by government and the reference press. It marks a milestone in the history of Portuguese writing — both for the convergence it achieved and for the still-open debate over the limits of legislating the orthography of a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people across four continents.