The reforms of 1911 and 1945

Until the early twentieth century, Portuguese had no official orthography. People wrote according to usage, printing-house tradition and personal taste, with wide variation: the same word might appear as pharmacia, farmácia or farmacia. The reforms of 1911 and 1945 put an end to that disorder and gave European Portuguese the written form we still recognise today, with only minor later adjustments.

The starting point: pseudo-etymological spelling

Nineteenth-century writing was dominated by an etymological tradition that tried to make the Latin or Greek origin of words visible in their spelling. Hence the Greek digraphs ph, th, rh and ch (with the value [k]), the letter y, the doubled consonants, and a whole series of consonants that were no longer pronounced. The result was a learned spelling, hard to acquire and often inconsistent, since those etymologies were frequently misreconstructed — decorative rather than rigorous.

Against it, in the late nineteenth century, rose the philologist Aniceto dos Reis Gonçalves Viana, whose Ortografia Nacional (1904) argued for a phonetic basis, tempered by morphology and tradition. It was his proposals that the Republic would adopt.

1911: the Republican reform

With the Republic proclaimed in October 1910, the new regime wanted to give the country a single orthography, above all to serve literacy and schooling. A commission chaired by Gonçalves Viana drafted the text, made official by decree on 1 September 1911. It was the first official orthography of the Portuguese language.

Its principles were clear: remove the pseudo-etymological elements and bring spelling closer to pronunciation. Among the most visible changes:

Before	After	Principle
*pharmácia*, *phósphoro*	*farmácia*, *fósforo*	*ph* → *f*
*theatro*, *orthographia*	*teatro*, *ortografia*	*th* → *t*
*rheumatismo*	*reumatismo*	*rh* → *r*
*chimica*, *christão*	*química*, *cristão*	Greek *ch* → *qu*/*c*
*estylo*, *lyrio*	*estilo*, *lírio*	*y* → *i*
*approvar*, *immenso*, *ella*	*aprovar*, *imenso*, *ela*	doubled consonants simplified

The reform kept only the digraphs rr and ss between vowels, systematically fixed the use of the acute and circumflex accents, and regularised the hyphen and the apostrophe. Within a few years Portuguese schools and the press had adopted the new norm.

The problem: two orthographies for one language

The 1911 reform was decided unilaterally by Portugal, without consulting Brazil. Brazil, which went on writing in the old way, thus found itself separated from the former metropolis by two divergent orthographies — all the more paradoxical in that both countries were simplifying, but at different paces and on different lines.

Decades of negotiation followed between the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Letters. A first agreement, in 1931, had limited application; Brazil approved its own Formulário Ortográfico in 1943. Full unification remained out of reach.

1945: the Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Convention

In October 1945 the two academies signed in Lisbon the Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Convention, a detailed system meant to unify the spelling of both countries. In Portugal it was made law by Decree-Law no. 35 228 of 8 December 1945, and it became the basis of official Portuguese orthography.

The convention consolidated and refined the 1911 system: it regulated accentuation, the hyphen and capitalisation in fine detail, and settled the treatment of the unpronounced consonants. Here lay the deepest divergence with Brazil. Portugal chose to keep etymological consonants that, though silent, could mark the openness of the preceding vowel or reflect learned forms:

Legacy

The 1945 norm governed European Portuguese writing for more than sixty years. It is the spelling in which most living speakers were schooled, and the source of nearly all the differences in spelling that the 1990 Orthographic Agreement would later try to resolve — especially the fate of the silent consonants. To understand 1911 and 1945 is therefore to understand the ground on which present-day Portuguese orthography stands.