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History of Portuguese

Evolution of the Portuguese language

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Social history

Romanization

Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the ancient Romans brought with them Latin, from which all Romance languages descend. The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous civilizations. Later, the inhabitants of the cities of Lusitania and the rest of Romanized Iberia were recognized as citizens of Rome.

Roman control of the western part of Hispania was not consolidated until the campaigns of Augustus in 26 BC. Although the western territories to the south of the Tagus River were conquered only after the victory of Licinius Crassus in the year 93 BC, only an estimated four hundred words of the native languages persist in modern Portuguese. After 200 years of wars, first with the Carthaginians in the Eastern part of the peninsula, and then with the local inhabitants, Emperor Augustus conquered the whole peninsula, which was named Hispania. He then divided it into three provinces: Hispania Tarraconensis, Hispania Baetica, and Lusitania, the latter of which included most of modern Portugal. At the end of the 3rd century, Emperor Diocletian split Tarraconensis into three parts, creating the adjacent province of Gallaecia, which geographically enclosed the remaining part of Portugal, and modern-day Galicia in the northwestern region of Spain.

Iberian Romance

Between AD 409 and 711, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Germanic tribes, mainly Suevi and Visigoths, who largely absorbed the Roman culture and language of the peninsula; however, since the Roman schools and administration were closed, the Vulgar Latin language of ordinary people was left free to evolve on its own and the uniformity of the language across the Iberian Peninsula broke down. In the north-western part of the peninsula (today's Northern Portugal and Galicia), Vulgar Latin began to develop local characteristics, becoming what linguists today call Galician-Portuguese. The Germanic languages influenced Galician-Portuguese by introducing words often linked to the military like guerra (war) or laverca (lark), placenames such as Resende, animals like ganso (goose), texugo (badger), human feelings such as orgulho (pride), verbs like brigar (to fight), suffixes like reguengo (royal domain) and everyday objects such as frasco (flask).

From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions. However, much of the population continued to speak the Latin-derived Romance dialects, now referred to collectively as Andalusi Romance by modern linguists, or as Mozarabic popularly. The Almohad conquest of al-Andalus led to the emigration of Andalusi Christians (Mozarabs) from southern Iberia, speakers of Andalusi Arabic and Romance, to the Christian north, especially to the Tagus valley. The main lasting effect of Arabic influence on Romance speech is lexical. Modern Portuguese has anywhere from 400 up to 800 words of Arabic origin, especially relating to food, agriculture and the crafts, which have no cognates in other Romance languages except in Spanish from which, in fact, Portuguese borrowed many of its Arabic-derived words. The Arabic influence is also visible in place names, especially in the southern provinces, such as the Algarve, Alfama and Fátima.

The oldest surviving records containing written Galician-Portuguese are documents from the 9th century. In these official documents, bits of Galician-Portuguese found their way into texts that were written in Latin. Today, this phase is known as "Proto-Portuguese" simply because the earliest of these documents are from the former County of Portugal, although Portuguese and Galician were still a single language. This period lasted until the 12th century.

The lyric period

What modern scholars call Galician-Portuguese was originally the native language of the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, which was founded in 910 and included the northern part of present-day Portugal. It appears to have also been used regularly in other Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula as the language for lyric song. It was employed by poets from throughout the non-Basque medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula; including Leon, Castile, Aragon and Catalonia. It is also the language used in the Cantigas de Santa Maria. These songs were traditionally attributed to Alfonso X, a Castilian king, though more recent work shows that they must have been composed in collaboration with many translators, poets and musicians.

The divergence of Galician-Portuguese

Portugal was formally recognized as an independent kingdom in 1143 by the Kingdom of León, into which Galicia was incorporated at the time, with Afonso Henriques as its first king. In 1290, King Diniz created the first Portuguese university, in Coimbra (the Estudo Geral) and decreed that the language of the Portuguese, then simply called the "Vulgar language" (i.e. Vulgar Latin) should be used in preference to Latin and known as the "Portuguese language". In 1296, Portuguese was adopted by the royal chancellary and was used not only in poetry but also when writing law and in notaries. In the first period of "Old Portuguese" (from the 12th to 14th century), the language came gradually to be used in official documents. With the political separation of the County of Portugal from Galicia, Galician-Portuguese lost its unity and slowly became two increasingly distinct languages. This growing difference accelerated when the kingdom of León was united with Castile (13th century) and Galician was increasingly influenced by Castilian. Meanwhile, the southern variant of Galician-Portuguese became the modern Portuguese language within the Kingdom of Portugal and its empire.

Portuguese outside of Portugal

Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, behind Spanish, partially because of the large population of speakers in Brazil, where it is the national language. There are many respects in which Brazilian Portuguese differs from European Portuguese in sound and structure.

Another notable difference is the presence of more audible vowels in Brazilian Portuguese. Beyond this, the nuances of spoken versions of both language practices continue to evolve as generations of speakers age and the world continues to globalize, leading to changes in language practices internationally. Portuguese has been made an official language of Mozambique, Angola, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Macao.

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