Portuguese language and Brazilian culture

“My country is the Portuguese language“

Fernando Pessoa

The Portuguese language is considered today, the sixth most-spoken language in the world and the third among the European languages. During the 15th century, seafaring from Portugal took the language to the four corners of the planet: from Brazil in South America to Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe in Africa, and to Goa, Damão, Diu and Macau in Asia and Timor in Oceania.

Although Portuguese is widely spoken in different regions across different continents, the various ethnic communities consider this language to be their own, so much so that the Portuguese, the Brazilians, many Africans and some Asians feel they share a common cultural heritage.
Once the language becomes a living cultural institution, it keeps growing richer in terms of lexis; new words appear and old words even take on new meanings by way of the history and social contexts in which they are used.

In places like Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Portuguese is the official language, but then there are the Creole variants as well as two main variants, which are neither regional nor dialectal, but that have their own grammatical and lexical differences, namely, European Portuguese and Brazilian.

In 1990, the official representatives of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Principe signed the Orthographic Agreement in Lisbon, an international treaty to create a unified spelling to be used by all Portuguese-speaking countries.
The agreement was born with the idea of ending the existence of two divergent official spelling rules: that of Portugal and that of Brazil. The agreement was conceived on the Spanish language model, whereby Spain and Latin America share a single written language, despite their phonetic and lexical differences.