Portuguese Voice Over Agency

Everything you never needed to know about speaking Portuguese

A bit about the language
The Portuguese language is a romance language and there are 26 letters in the alphabet which consists of 5 vowels and 21 consonants.

Missing Letters
You won’t find the letters K, Y OR W in traditional Portuguese. They are only in words that have been borrowed from other countries.

Widely Spoken
Portuguese is the official language of Portugal and other countries which it colonised like Brazil, Mozambique, and Equatorial Guinea. Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Angola, Principe, and Sao Tome also have Portuguese as their official language. That’s nine countries altogether including Portugal itself.

Oops!
Don’t worry if you spill some of your red wine on the table while you’re in a bar or restaurant. In Portugal spilling wine on the table is said to bring good luck. Don’t though be tempted to walk backwards while admiring a good view. Walking backwards, say the Portuguese, teaches the devil the ay you are walking and is bad luck.

Bridge over Portuguese waters
The longest bridge in Europe is in Portugal. It’s the Vasco de Gama bridge which is in Lisbon, and it is around 17.2 kilometres long. That’s just over 10 miles.

That’s a lot of Santa’s
Back in 2008 the people of Portugal decided to raise money for charity by dressing up as Father Christmas. The event took place in Porto and more than 14,000 people took to the streets dressed as Santa. Each Santa donated one euro to buy presents for deprived children and the event was considered to be a great success.

Mmm… delicious
The largest omelette in the world was made by the Ferreira do Zezere city council in Santarem, Portugal. The omelette was prepared by a team of 55 people, and they used 145,000 eggs. The finished omelette had a diameter of 10.3 metres, which is 33 feet and 8 inches and weighed 6466 kilos which is 14225 pounds. All the eggs were donated by Portugal’s largest producing company, Uno Ovo. The omelette was made on the 11th of August 2012 to celebrate the Immigrant Festival.

Book worms
For all you book worms out there, did you know the oldest bookshop in the world is in Portugal? It’s called Livraria Betrand and it’s in Lisbon. It was first opened in 1732 and it is still selling books today. The Portuguese obviously enjoy a good book.

Mind where you wee
If you’re in the sea in Portugal and you feel the urge to do a wee, try to resist. It’s illegal to wee in the sea in Portugal and you’ll be fined if they catch you. How the powers that be will know your weeing in the sea is a mystery, unless you make it very obvious!

Bony Chapels
Some of the chapels in Portugal are made using the bones of Monks. The Capela de Ossos in Evora, Portugal is a fine example. It is a chapel next to the Church of Saint Francis and the interior walls are all covered with the bones and skulls of more than 1,000 Franciscan Monks.

A short history on the Portuguese language

Portuguese belongs to the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which include Spanish, Galician and Catalan. These are all descended from the Vulgar (colloquial) Latin spoken by Roman soldiers when they arrived on the Iberian Peninsular in the 3rd century BCE.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the region was conquered by Germanic tribes (between 409 and 711 AD) – but these occupiers also adopted the local Vulgar Latin dialects. In 711 the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsular brought Arabic to the region, which had some impact on the development of the local language.

Vulgar Latin gradually evolved into Galician-Portuguese, which was spoken throughout the medieval Kingdom of Galicia. After Portugal broke off to become a separate kingdom in 1130, Portuguese was established as the official language of that country.

The spread of the Portuguese Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries took the language across the world, to Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Which countries have Portuguese as a national language?

Portuguese is the only official language of Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official status in Macau and East Timor.

How many people speak Portuguese as their first language?

It is estimated that over 200 million people speak Portuguese as their first language worldwide, making it the second most widely spoken Romance language (after Spanish), the third most spoken European language, and the seventh most spoken of all languages in the world.

Did you know…

• There are up to 1,000 words derived from Arabic in Modern Portuguese. These mainly relate to food, agriculture, crafts and place names (the latter especially in the south, eg the Algarve and Fátima).
• Although there are several different Portuguese dialects, the two major classifications are European (or Standard) Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. These developed along slightly different lines from around the 18th century onwards; in Portugal the language was influenced by French, while in Brazil it was influenced by Italian and other European languages.
• The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach and establish trade links with Japan (in 1542) and they brought their language with them. There are many Japanese words of Portuguese origin, including: arukooru/alcool/alcohol; botan/botão/button; kirishitan/cristão/christian; pan/pão/bread.

The Portuguese economy

Portugal has a mixed economy, rated (as of 2013) as the 49th largest in the world. It has become increasingly diverse and service-based since joining the European Community (predecessor to the European Union) in 1986.

Portugal’s main import/export partners are other members of the EU.