European Portuguese

Portuguese is a pluricentric language; it is the same language with several interacting codified standard forms in many countries. Portuguese is a Romance language with Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Arabic influence. It was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before as Galician-Portuguese. With the formation of Portugal as a country in the 12th century, the language evolved into Portuguese. In the Spanish province of Galicia to the north of Portugal, the native language is Galician. Both Portuguese and Galician are very similar and natives can understand each other as they share the same recent common ancestor. Portuguese and Spanish are different languages, although they share 89% of their lexicon, the same percentage found in other neighboring languages in Europe, such as French and Italian.

Phonology

Vowels

Vowel classification

Portuguese uses vowel height to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables; the vowels tend to be raised to when they are unstressed (see below for details). The dialects of Portugal are characterized by reducing vowels to a greater extent than others. Falling diphthongs are composed of a vowel followed by one of the high vowels or ; although rising diphthongs occur in the language as well, they can be interpreted as hiatuses.

European Portuguese possesses quite a wide range of vowel allophones:

• All vowels are lowered and retracted before .
• All vowels are raised and advanced before alveolar, palato-alveolar and palatal consonants.
• Word-finally, as well as unstressed and are voiceless .

The realization of in this contrast occurs in a limited morphological context, namely in verbal conjugation between the first person plural present and past perfect indicative forms of verbs such as pensamos ('we think') and pensámos ('we thought'). proposes that it is a kind of crasis rather than phonemic distinction of and . It means that in falamos 'we speak' there is the expected prenasal -raising: , while in falámos 'we spoke' there are phonologically two in crasis: . Close-mid vowels and open-mid vowels ( and ) contrast only when they are stressed. In unstressed syllables, they occur in complementary distribution.

According to Mateus and d'Andrade (2000:19), in European Portuguese, the stressed only occurs in the following three contexts:

• Before a palatal consonant (such as telha )
• Before the palatal front glide (such as lei )
• Before a nasal consonant (such as cama )

In Greater Lisbon (according to NUTS III, which does not include Setúbal) can be centralized before palatal sounds (); e.g. roupeiro , brenha , texto , vejo , coelho .

European Portuguese "e caduc"

European Portuguese possesses a near-close near-back unrounded vowel. It occurs in unstressed syllables such as in pegar ('to grip'). There is no standard symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this sound. The IPA Handbook transcribes it as , but in Portuguese studies is traditionally used.

• Traditionally, it is pronounced when "e" is unstressed; e.g. verdade , perigo .
• However, if "e" is initial, then it is pronounced ; e.g. energia , exemplo .
• When "e" is adjacent to another vowel, it becomes ; e.g. real .
• However, notice that when the e caduc is preceded by a semi-vowel, it may become poesia , quietude .
• For the most part, unstressed "i" is not lowered to . However, when it is adjacent to a palatal consonant, , or to in the preceding/following syllable, it usually does become . E.g. ministro , príncipe , artilhar , caminhar , pistola , pijama .
• The Portuguese e caduc may be elided, becoming in some instances a syllabic consonant; e.g. verdade , perigo , energia, , ministro , príncipe , artilhar , caminhar , pistola .

There are very few minimal pairs for this sound: some examples include pregar ('to nail') vs. pregar ('to preach'; the latter stemming from earlier preegar < Latin praedicāre), sê ('be!') vs. sé ('see/cathedral') vs. se ('if'), and pêlo ('hair') vs. pélo ('I peel off') vs. pelo ('by the' + masc.), after orthographic changes, all these three words are now spelled pelo.

Consonants