Portuñol and the Border Varieties

Portuñol (in Portuguese portunhol) is the everyday name for whatever comes out of the meeting between Portuguese and Spanish. The label, however, covers very different realities: from the makeshift speech improvised by people crossing a border without command of the language on the other side, to stable varieties handed down from parents to children for generations. It is a single name — a blend of português/portugués and espanhol/español — for a whole range of phenomena.

One word, several phenomena

It helps to separate three uses of the term that ordinary speech runs together:

Sense	What it is	Where it occurs
Improvised portuñol	An unstable interlanguage: speakers of one language reaching for the other	Tourism, trade, casual contact
Border varieties	Mixed, stable, native speech — one language as the base with strong influence from the other	Brazil’s borders, above all with Uruguay
Literary portunhol	A deliberate register, cultivated by writers as an aesthetic resource	South American poetry and fiction

Only the second is, strictly speaking, a linguistic variety in the sense that dialects are. It is the case linguistics attends to most closely, and it is along Brazil’s edges that it is best observed.

The border and its history

Brazil’s longest land border runs for thousands of kilometres and separates — in theory — the domain of Portuguese from that of the Spanish-American countries. At many points, though, the line is anything but sharp. The most studied case is northern Uruguay, the legacy of a long dispute between the Portuguese and Spanish crowns over the Banda Oriental. Sparsely populated, the region was settled largely from Brazil, and Portuguese remained the dominant language there well into the 19th century.

Uruguay’s independence (1828) and, above all, the school reform led by José Pedro Varela (the Common Education Act, 1877), which imposed Spanish as the sole language of instruction, reversed the balance. The Portuguese of the north lost all institutional backing and became a domestic vernacular, overlaid by official Spanish — ideal ground for prolonged contact between the two languages.

The Portuguese dialects of Uruguay

The resulting speech is known in linguistics today as DPU — Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay — a label settled on by Adolfo Elizaincín and colleagues. José Pedro Rona had earlier called it the dialecto fronterizo; the speakers themselves often say they speak brasilero or simply portunhol. It is concentrated in the departments of Artigas, Rivera and Cerro Largo, along the border line.

Contrary to what the popular name suggests, these are not a fifty-fifty blend: most researchers describe them as Portuguese-based varieties with a strong Spanish overlay in vocabulary, sound and syntax. They keep clearly Portuguese traits — the nasal vowels, the Portuguese verb system — while taking in Spanish words and structures from the surrounding language. The degree of mixing varies from speaker to speaker and from situation to situation, along a continuum that runs from more conservative Portuguese to regional Spanish.

Twin cities such as Rivera (Uruguay) and Santana do Livramento (Brazil), separated only by a street and with no border control, embody that continuum: one walks from one country — and one official language — to the other on foot, with no break in between.

Status, stigma and reclamation

For a long time the DPU were seen — by their own speakers too — as “bad Portuguese” or “broken Spanish,” a mark of poverty and little schooling. That stigma helped them recede before standard Spanish, especially among the young and in towns.

In recent decades, however, a movement of reclamation has taken shape. Academic research, begun in the 1960s and 1970s, gave them existence and a name; and literature gave them prestige. The Uruguayan poet Fabián Severo writes deliberately in border portuñol — as in Noite nu Norte (2010) — turning the stigmatised vernacular into the matter of poetry.

Beyond Uruguay

Uruguay is the best-documented case, but Portuguese-Spanish contact marks the whole South American frontier of Portuguese — with Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela. Nowhere else has a variety crystallised that is as studied as the DPU, yet everywhere the improvised portuñol is part of daily life.