The varieties of Portuguese — an overview

Portuguese is not a uniform language. Spoken today by some 260 million people across four continents, it spreads across nation-states, dialects, registers and creoles whose differences range from pronunciation to syntax. This section maps that mosaic: the major national varieties, the dialects within each, and the creole languages that Portuguese gave rise to. This article is the map.

Language, standard and variety

Three levels are worth keeping apart, since everyday usage conflates them. The language is the shared system — what lets someone from Lisbon and someone from São Paulo understand each other. A variety is a concrete form of that system, tied to a place, a group or a moment: the Portuguese of Coimbra, of Luanda, of the sixteenth century. The standard is the variety a community elects as its model of prestige and teaches in school.

No variety is, in itself, more “correct” than another: a standard is a social and historical choice, not a verdict on the quality of speech. What this section describes are real varieties; what grammars codify are standards.

Why a language varies

Variation has regular causes. In space, separated communities innovate differently — this is diatopic variation, the variation of dialects. In time, every language changes from one generation to the next (diachronic variation). There is also diastratic variation, tied to social group, and diaphasic variation, tied to situation: no one speaks the same way in a courtroom and in a café.

In the case of Portuguese, a further force joins these: the history of its expansion. Carried from the fifteenth century onward to Africa, Asia and the Americas, the language took root in settings of contact with very diverse substrates, from Tupi to Kimbundu. The result was not only accents but grammatical reorganisations and, at the limit, new languages — the creoles.

A pluricentric language

Portuguese is today a pluricentric language: it has more than one centre of norm-setting. At least two great standard norms coexist with full legitimacy — the European and the Brazilian — and distinct standards are taking shape in Angola and Mozambique. This sets Portuguese apart from monocentric languages and has practical consequences: dictionaries, grammars and examinations differ according to the centre of reference.

The Orthographic Agreement of 1990, in force across the various countries, unified part of the spelling — but a common orthography does not erase the differences of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, which remain and define each variety.

The map of this section

The articles that follow are organised on three levels:

• National and continental varieties — European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and the differences between them, as well as Angolan Portuguese and the Mozambican variety.
• Dialects and ways of speaking in Portugal — the variation internal to the European territory, including the dialects of Portugal, the island speech and singular cases such as Mirandese (a language in its own right, not a dialect) and Barranquenho.
• Portuguese-based creoles — the creoles of Cape Verde, Guinea, São Tomé and Asia: autonomous languages generated by contact, not varieties of Portuguese.

How to read these varieties

Throughout this section, European Portuguese is the house voice; the other varieties appear by contrast, flagged in boxes of their own. The aim is not to rank but to describe with precision: to show what is common to the whole language and what belongs to each of its forms. To vary is, after all, the natural state of any living language — and few vary as richly as Portuguese.