THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD

Abstract

The Portuguese Language is the seventhregarding speakers’ number in the world, a consequence of the greatnavigations, carried out by the Portuguese, colonizing lands in Asia, Africaand America. It spread through a vast domain, which reached the farthestregions, enriching itself with a great flow of experiences: foreign flora,surprisingly fauna and different religious, political and social conditions.Thus, it became a language of basic culture in the modern world, having,alongside, a rich and great literature. From 1500, there started the Braziliansaga, building, little by little, the biggest spoken nation of PortugueseLanguage in the world. Besides the heritage received, the Portuguese Languagein Brazil was enlarged by indigenous and African contributions, making thespoken language in Brazil different from the spoken language inherited fromPortugal. Along with the various immigrations throughout the centuries whilethe country was rising, it was developed, in several regions, differentdialects among themselves, but always inter-understood. Moreover, socialrupturing has determined differences among speakers of diverse classes.Nevertheless, the Portuguese language, with its respected and known pluralityof forms (vocabulary, phonetics, syntax) remains being understood, all through thenational territory, as the vernacular language. In the transplantation of thelanguage, it was not only the ordinary language, which crossed oceans, but awhole linguistic domain. The Portuguese language got into contact with suchmany new things to denominate, such many sensations to refer to, and such manystrangeness to tell that it had to provide itself with a renewed vocabulary,borrowed from the languages in touch. The initial nucleus was kept, whichconferred its character. No living language is uniform in its whole. And thesame thing happens to the Portuguese, yet, a transplanted language. It hasevolved aside the academicism and restriction of prescriptive grammars.Furthermore, this transplanted language has developed uniformly within preexistenttrends.