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Brazilian Portuguese is a diglossic language
<<Jordi: Do you have an international academy of the language? <<
No, Here in Brazil we have Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Literature). Its foundation has been influenced by French Academy of Language and not by Portuguese Academy of Language.
The languages spoken in Portugal and Brazil have become so distant because Portuguese had never invested in Brazil's education when Brazil was Portuguese colony. First universities were opened after the independance but it was kind of too late to recover the formal, written language (based on Lisbon-portuguese) as a spoken language. The idioms of middle class Cambridge-living Britisher and L.A-living middle class American are very close, so they will have no problems communicating. Americans can understand BBC-English perfectly. But Brazilians normally do not understand Portuguese newscasters (there are two Portuguese TVstations that can be watched in Brazil: RTP internacional and SIC internacional).
As I said before, If Portugal had invested some money in Brazil's education, there would be no diglossia in Brazil today.. (UK opened many universities in its colony (today's USA) - Harvard, Yale...)
Current situation in Brazil can be compared with Middle Age Italy: everyone was speaking Italian vernacular, but the standard language (written language, that is) was Latin.
In Brazil, Portuguese language is our ''Latin''. But I think no one will ever adopt this formal written language as their 1st, spoken langage. No people, no matter who educated they are use this H-variant to raise their children (Even the upper class Brazilians use the vernacular when they talk to their children, so there is NO Brazilian who has the ''standard Portuguese'' as their mother tongue).
As someone has said before, language teachers do not normally correct pupils' spoken language, only the written form (essays, stories, documants) are corrected.
H-form is used in newspapers,textbooks, but with many hypercorrections. It is because of these hypercorrections Continental Portuguese speakers do not like reading a foreign book translated into Brazilian Portuguese.
But if you people can understand Spanish, how come don't you understand EP?
I found this thread really fascinating and forwarded it to a South American friend, who responded with the following amazing "treatise":-
"Indeed, what you quote about the differences between Portugal’s and Brazilian Portuguese is true. A few years ago, Portugal’s ambassador to Colombia was a poet of some renown and he used to give readings of his poems on one of the radio stations I listen to and, believe it or not, I could not understand one word of what he was saying. This lack of understanding occurred perhaps because in the last 51 years I have spoken or heard Portuguese (Brazilian) on counted occasions and for 30 years have been struggling with Spanish.
When I was a kid in Brazil I could imitate the Portuguese accent and in 1949 we went by ship from Belém in the mouth of the Amazon river to Liverpool, making scales in Madeira and the canary Islands, plus Lisbon and Porto. One time my mother, who was born in Brazil, took us kids ashore to a restaurant and she order ice-cream for us. When the waiter came back he brought some bottles and she started arguing with him about how it was possible for the ice-cream to flow from the bottle, until I took a look at it and saw that the label said “beer” in English and told her in English. It turned out that the Portuguese call ice-cream “gelado” (frozen) akin to the Italian “gelato” and in Brazil, it is called “sorvete” which the waiter confused with “cerveja” (beer). On that trip, my mother would get mad because my father who in spite being a Scots spoke excellent Brazilian Portuguese could also mimic the Portugal accent that she could not, and make himself understood while she could not.
To make a comparison with British and American English, Portugal’s Portuguese is very akin to a very strong and thick guttural Scottish brogue, with thrilled “r” and a tendency similar to the Cockney English to eat up vowels and the “h”. Brazilian Portuguese has a very soft pronunciation, the native Indians, who the Portuguese enslaved, could not pronounce the letter “r” to begin with, and besides were very soft spoken, and so over five centuries the spoken language became gradually softer. With Brazil being such a far away colony run mostly by people that came from the lower rungs of the Portuguese society it is unlikely that they would speak the “King’s Portuguese” just like it occurred in the States or for that matter in Australia if one is to believe what one hears in movies featuring Australians. In a way Brazil’s Portuguese pronunciation has a relationship similar to the continental one as the English spoken by Negroes (oops, African-Americans) from the Deep South has to standard American or British English.
In a way Brazilian Portuguese sounds more like French than Portugal’s Portuguese or Spanish; it has a great variety of accents, more than French has, and these bedevil their Spanish-speaking neighbors since in Spanish there is only one accent. A Brazilian Portuguese speaker easily understands Spanish be it the Italianate language spoken in Argentina or the more purer one spoken in the Andean regions of Colombia, but it does not work the other way around, my children had to communicate with their cousins in English and so did my wife. The richness of the sounds they heard confounded them even though the written words are quite similar, their ears are accustomed to a flat sounding language.
Incidentally, the Portuguese spoken in Angola and Mozambique is also quite different from Portugal and Brazil’s pronunciation, having been influenced by whatever African dialects were originally spoken in these former colonies.
In the early 1800’s Napoleon invaded and occupied Portugal and unlike the Spanish court who submitted to him, the Portuguese court migrated to Brazil and thus began the Brazilian ascendancy over Portugal. Once the Portuguese king returned after Wellington expelled the French from the Iberian Peninsula, he left his eldest son behind. Native Brazilians soon convinced him to part ways with the mother country and for some 60 years Brazil was an empire, an anomaly in the American continent. To this day, Portuguese continue to migrate to Brazil in spite of it being until quite recently a Third World country. Portugal being such a poor land, Brazil represented to them a land of opportunity. These Portuguese immigrants were generally hard working people and many made considerable fortunes, to the chagrin and envy of Brazilians who in good part resented them. When I was a kid, most of the jokes fell into two categories: parrots and Portuguese people. By definition, the Portuguese immigrants were called “dumb animals” mainly because initially they could not adapt to local costumes and mostly because they spoke differently from the rest of the population.
Almost as equal as the Portuguese influence in Brazil is the Negro whose culture permeates all levels of society, they were brought from Africa by the millions to work on sugar plantations in the mid part of the country, and many sections there are mostly black or mulatto. In the fourth-quarter of the 19th Century the Brazilian government became concerned about the country becoming entirely black and started fomenting the migration of white Europeans, mainly Italians and Germans from the poorer parts of that country like Pomerania. These settled from Rio to the south where until the early 1940’s there were entire populations that spoke only German, including the few blacks that had drifted that far south. Northern Brazil with its Amazon jungle was not apt for sugar cane cultivation, so very few black slaves were sent there. When my parents moved from Belém to Rio de Janeiro in 1941 my big surprise as a child was seeing so many black people in one place. I had never seen one before."
As a Scots - Brazilian, with a Brazilian mother, who lived in Brazil for 17 of my first 19 years and still have a brother and sister there, I find the discussions on this site very interesting but have a small remark to make.
Quite a few writers note that BP prefers "você" (thou) over "tu" (you) when addressing another person. This is true in southern Brazil, in northern Brazil especially in Belém, Pará, and Manaus, Amazonas, the "tu" form to this day still preferred. As a boy, when my parents moved from Belém to Rio de Janeiro in 1941, it was very hard for me to address other people as você and 64 years later still is.
Yes, it then was true and still is to some extent is is that the common Brazilian resented the Portuguese immigrants, perhaps because their financial success. Then, by definition, a Portuguese was known as a "bicho burro" (dumb animal) and probably 50% of all jokes made fun of them.
The BP accent is a marvelous thing, full of sonorities and melodious intonations that one does not find in PP or Spanish. This by the way confounds Brazil's Spanish-speaking neighbors who usually cannot adapt their years to the nuances of spoken BP. Being married to a Colombian and having children born in California and partially raised in Colombia it is difficult for them to communicate with my family in Brazil with the result that they end up speaking in English.
It has been my experience that if a foreigner that comes to South America lerns BP first, he will not have problems understanding Spanish, be it the Italianate language spoken in Argentina or the more purer spoken in the Andean regions of Colombia. However, the if the foreigner learns Spanish first, very likely he will not be able to understand BP.
For you linguists (I am a chemist) an interesting study of the transformations that European languages suffer in America, would be the study of Carribbean Spanish, a language spoken in Venezuela, the Atlantic coast of Colombia and through out Central America, I linken it to the Cockney dialect, in relation to standard spoken English.
Yeah, but only 10 % of Brazilians use TU. For 90 % Brazilians it is an archaic form (comparable with THOU in English). Just like there are still THOU, THY and THEE used in some British dialects, but as a rule these word should be considered archaisms in British English (both standard (or formal) and informal))
Brazilians who use TU (=thou), use it with the VOCÊ(=you) verbal forms, since thou-verb forms like ÉS, FORES...(meaning ART) sound dated or archaic, even for TU (thou) users.
you are (you as an informal pronoun, in singular):
tu és (Standard European Portuguese but archaic in Brazilian Portuguese) [=thou art]
tu é (regional usage in some parts of Brazil) [ literally: thou are]
você é (standard Brazilian usage, and preferred by 90 % Brazilians) [it means YOU ARE]
As I have said, TU (=thou) has surviveved as a pronoun in some parts of Brazil, but 99 % of people who use TU, use it with the ''wrong'' verbal forms, they use the verbal forms of VOCÊ (=you) with it.
''You spoke'' is said:
VOCÊ FALOU (Standard Brazilian Portuguese, used by 90 % of Brazlians)
TU FALASTE (Standard European Portuguese, and archaic Brazlian Portuguese)
--------------------------------------------------by mixing them we get:
TU FALOU (regional informal brazilian portuguese)*
*(its use is informal and regional: southernmost parts of Brazil (close to Uruguay), and northernmost parts of Brazil (close to Venezuela) have this use, althou you will find many people who use VOCÊ only and never TU as their informal pronoun; TU(=thou) can be heard in Rio: low class people from Rio use TU and say TU FALOU, but middle class and upperclass Cariocas would say VOCÊ FALOU even informally).
Vitaminada:
When one tries "to split" from another language one will always look for the solutions "that are not shared" and "as far removed as possible". I'm sure that if communication between the Portuguese-speaking nations of the world became greater (let's say more normal) the languages would come together again and Portuguese would borrow from Brazilian and the other Portuguese-speaking countries would also play in the game. We are in the era of International Television and the Internet and the only thing you are proving is that even some Brazilians don't understand each other (it's only a matter on how the "educated" in Brazil are probably still a minority given the circumstances of the country.
See what has happened with Gallego, originally Portuguese and more and more "hispanised" since it is in Spain and the Spanish regionalists do everything possible to the point that it is becoming "more and more Spanish". Galician peasants sound much more "portuguese" than the Standard Regional language of the Xunta de Galicia. Did you know that Brazilian sit-coms were passed in Brazilian Portuguese in Galicia and that they understand most of what they say. South American soap operas became quite popular in Spain in the 1990s and lots of vocabulary has entered continental Spanish, some of the words had been dead for a few centuries on this side of the pond.
The same thing could happen, in the long run, with Brazilian since it could become more and more influenced by its "Spanish" neighbours. In whose interest is it to weaken the international Portuguese-speaking community? France and Spain (its Latin sisters) will do nothing to help, I can assure you, and the US will only be too happy if Brazilians speak English in Europe instead of Portuguese.
I think it is in the interest of Portugal and Brazil to keep the unity of the language and to invest in that sense. Although it might sound as a paradox to you, it would be even better for Brazil since it would make a more Brazilian Brazil and a more Portuguese Portugal and Galicia would also go behind if they have a strong world community, and you would all give to each other, the way English-speaking countries do.
Portugal, although a small country, will always be your stronghold in Europe and that is something too precious for you to lose. Imagine what you could do if you had a Portuguese-speaking region in North America.
The rest is domestic church bell policy (política de campanario) and it doesn't lead you anywhere.
I think all world languages have variants but that doesn't mean -no matter what you say I'm a linguist- that Brazilian is as far removed from Portuguese as Latin is. The common structures and the common vocabulary is still basically the same (with a deep primary unity) although there are quite a few differences as you say. there is such a thing as "passive understanding". I can assure you I understood all the Portuguese and all the Brazilian written sentences. They were just different ways of saying the same thing. I don't speak Portuguese but as a Romance-language linguist, I can read it very well.
Brazil is bound to be a world power (if only they let you) and Portugal will certainly become more and more a modern influential small European country. I hope you get the point.
Long live the unity of the Portuguese language and long live the greatest Portuguese-speaking country: Brazil!
Vitaminada,
You can say what you want about the spoken language (although I still don't accept your argument that what is spoken in Brazil is a different language altogether.....and I had read all of the articles you provided a long time ago), but you can't deny that what is written in the Folha of São Paulo, Globo, etc. is Portuguese. I never said that Brazilians speak "standard Portuguese"....I said that Brazilians speak Brazilian Portuguese.
Are you trying to tell me that the characters in Brazilian movies like "Central Station" aren't speaking Portuguese?
Just because one can't understand another dialect does not mean that it's an altogether separate language. There are probably some dialects of English that I'd have a hard time understanding, nevertheless they're still dialects of English.
Fortunately, most Brazilians I've met in my life have always said proudly "não falamos espanhol no Brasil...falamos português" (claro, português brasileiro).
The reason "tu" is used around Rio is because it was the colonial capital after it was moved from Salvador. Due to the large influx of Portuguese to Rio de Janeiro when João VI had the entire royal family stationed there, one can hear the influence of the Portuguese in the Carioca accent....the "sh" sound so typical of Portuguese from Portugal.
For those who can read Portuguese, this is an article that appeared in Globo that tackles the subject we have been discussing above.
I agree with Mr. Neto...viva a língua portuguesa!
http://intervox.nce.ufrj.br/~edpaes/sabe.htm
VIVA A LÍNGUA BRASILEIRA!
We don't understand Continental Portuguese and that's it!
Hopefully, all Portuguese tv shows and films will be dubbed into Brazilian so will never be influenced by harsh Arab-sounding Continental Portuguese. Spain is considered prestigious in Mexico, BBC English is considered fancy in the States, but we Brazilians do not care about Portugal at all, and we wish they left us be!
Mjd, me sacou, hein?
Ou cê tá viajando na maior maionese?
A great page on real linguistic situation:
http://www.necco.ca/faq_no_longer_camoes.htm
http://www.necco.ca/faq_what_clients_need_to_know.htm
''Not everyone is aware of the fact that the differences between Brazilian and Continental Portuguese far exceed those existing among the several varieties of English, Spanish or French. However, language specialists consistently recognize such differences. For instance, unlike the case for other languages, Portuguese-as-a-second-language primers, dictionaries and grammars invariably identify the variety of Portuguese that they contain. Furthermore, prestigious organizations such as the Foreign Service and the Center for Applied Linguistics have different tests to assess each variety of the language. ''
Mjd!
I read the text of Mr. Neto. Since he's Brazilian I would agree that Brazilian is a beautiful variant of Portuguese and the same language. I agree with him and his beautiful Portuguese is quite easy to understand.
Pasquale is a conservative grammarian but he is no linguist at all.
Feel free to read this great article:
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Língua portuguesa ou tupiniquim?
André Chaves de Melo
A natureza da Língua Portuguesa falada no Brasil é o tema central do livro Português ou Brasileiro: Um convite à pesquisa (Parábola Editorial, 182 páginas), de Marcos Bagno que teve sua primeira edição já esgotada. A segunda deverá sair em breve. Bagno é especialista em lingüística e tradutor profissional de inglês, francês, espanhol e italiano, com mais de 20 livros publicados, a maioria deles de literatura infanto-juvenil, incluindo contos. Neste livro, ele apresenta ao público uma série de conclusões sobre a Língua Portuguesa falada no Brasil, algumas resultantes de sua tese de doutorado, defendida na Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH) da USP. Trata-se de uma contribuição à antiga e polarizada discussão, que atualmente tem ganhado novo impulso, sobre se a língua falada pelos brasileiros ainda é o português ou se já podemos chamá-la de brasileiro.
Segundo Bagno, nem um a coisa nem outra. Vivemos atualmente um momento intermediário do desenvolvimento de nossa língua, pois ela ainda se assemelha com o português falado em Portugal, mas apresenta grandes diferenças estruturais, principalmente com relação ao uso que os falantes de lá e de cá fazem dos recursos lingüísticos que têm à sua disposição. Isso que significa que nos comunicamos através de uma língua ou idioma que podemos chamar de português brasileiro. "É muito provável que daqui a 500 anos ela já esteja tão diferente do português de Portugal que os dois povos não se entenderão mais. Aí sim será possível chamar nossa língua simplesmente de brasileiro", diz Bagno.
Para o pesquisador, o surgimento das línguas sempre foi assim, com raízes comuns, mas com diferenças que lhe dão personalidades e vidas próprias, desenvolvidas ao longo do tempo de acordo com as variações culturais das sociedades que as criam e utilizam. Um exemplo disso está na Península Ibérica, onde surgiram o português e o espanhol derivados do latim vulgar e com outras influências, tão parecidos ainda hoje mas tão diferentes. "Desde o primeiro dia em que um português começou a falar em terras brasileiras, a língua iniciou seu processo irreversível de mudança", explica Bagno. "Infelizmente, na mentalidade da grande maioria das pessoas, alimentada principalmente pela escola e pelos defensores da gramática tradicional que invadiram a mídia, esse processo de mudança é visto como decadência, ruína e corrupção do idioma", critica. "E o mais curioso é que em todos os campos da vida social, a mudança e o progresso são vistos como coisas positivas. No caso da língua isso acaba sendo entendido apenas como fruto da falta de cultura, do falar errado da maioria da população."
Linguagem culta
Um dos capítulos do livro é dedicado ao Projeto NURC, foi criado no início dos anos 70 com o objetivo de melhorar o conhecimento sobre a língua realmente falada pelos brasileiros cultos. Foram feitas gravações da língua falada por essas pessoas em cinco grandes centros urbanos (Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo e Porto Alegre). Após a transcrição e análise do conteúdo dessa língua, os pesquisadores perceberam que ela possui sua própria gramática, com regras muito diferentes daquelas que aparecem até hoje como únicas "certas" nas gramáticas normativas e no ensino tradicional.
Para ilustrar, os pronomes oblíquos de terceira pessoa (o, a, os, as) praticamente desapareceram da língua dos brasileiros e só aparecem de vez em quando, em situações extremamente formais quando o falante quer mostrar que conhece bem as regras aprendidas na escola. O acervo do NURC tem servido, nos últimos 30 anos, para a realização de várias monografias, dissertações e teses, como a que deu origem ao livro de Bagno.
Além da discussão sobre a situação da nossa língua, o autor teve outra intenção, que foi oferecer aos professores de português, principalmente do ensino médio, algumas ferramentas teóricas e práticas para começarem a introduzir a pesquisa lingüística em sala de aula como forma de estimular os estudantes a refletirem sobre o funcionamento da língua.
source: http://www.usp.br/agen/bols/1998_2001/rede859.htm
Vitaminada's argument that Portugal is to blame for Brazil's underdevelopment is often typical of many Brazilians during these Lusitanian/Brazilian Portuguese discussions. As I said earlier, I don't understand this mentality (and I'm pretty well-versed in Brazilian history). Today's social maladies in Brazil may have their roots in the colonial era, but they continued and developed long after Pedro I's "independência ou morte."
It certainly isn't in Brazil's best interest to "not speak Portuguese" with regard to international business, trade, etc.
Jordi,
I too agree with Mr. Neto.
Check out the link I provided earlier on in the discussion for the Ciberdúvidas linguistic team. The team consists of Portuguese and Brazilian writers and linguists and they tackle all sorts of Portuguese language-related questions, from the simple to the more comlex.
What surprises me the most is how Vitaminada gives us texts written in perfect Portuguese telling us that the language isn't Portuguese. If the language has evolved it certainly hasn't in those texts. Why don't they write the language they consider to be different to Portuguese?
According to the last text it tells us that maybe in 500 years time Portuguese and Brazilian will be different languages and that they are well in that way. That could be the case for any language. Imagine there is some kind of nuclear disaster and some English-speaking tribes remain scattered somewhere in Arizona, somewhere in the Australian desert and somewhere in Essex. Would they speak the same language in 500 years time? They would certainly evolve and if they go back to the Dark Ages, their language would simplify (as happened with the primitive Romance languages regarding classic Latin).
To they that Portugal speaks some sort of Moorish gibberish is just as true for Spanish, for instance. The fact is there is no Arabic syntax in these languages and only loan words, which are usually disappearing since they belong to the sphere of traditional farming life.
The fact is we are in the era of the Internet and International Television and it would seem there is a clear agenda, on behalf of Vitaminada, to separate Portuguese from Brazilian. After having read a few articles I realise that there are also big difference amongst Brazilian Portuguese dialects: a fact "linguistic secessionism" always denies since it has to make people believe there is some sort of "divine and natural" national standard.
What is the official Brazilian policy on this issue? If Brazilian government, schools and most of the writers agree on the linguistic unity of Brazil and Portugal, that unity will remain and improve as education and knowledge improves.
What do you mean a grammarian is not a linguist? I would have thought a sociolinguist with some sort of other training is not a linguist, but a grammarian is definitely a linguist. If he isn't, who is? That's another factor about "language secessionists" they will deny training and skills to those who don't think like them, although they usually are the ones who do not have real training in linguistics and they are always far from philology.
I'm sorry for that Vitaminada but that is how I feel about this issue, as a trained Romance-language linguist, of course.
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