The Portuguese Alphabet
Portuguese uses the full twenty-six-letter alphabet, with k, w and y confined to borrowings and names. What makes Portuguese spelling distinctive is not the letters but the diacritics, and every one of them changes the word rather than dressing it up.
The five marks
| mark | example use | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| tilde | on a and o | makes the vowel nasal. This is the big one. |
| acute | on any vowel | marks stress, and opens the vowel |
| circumflex | on a, e, o | marks stress, and closes the vowel |
| grave | on a only | marks a contraction of the preposition with the article |
| cedilla | under c | forces an s sound before a, o and u |
The tilde is the one with no English parallel. It nasalises the vowel underneath it, sending the air through the nose as well as the mouth. Portuguese nasal vowels are not the same as the French ones and are not optional: dropping the nasality produces a different word, or no word at all.
The tilde is not the only sign of a nasal vowel, though. A vowel before m or n at the end of a syllable is nasal too, with no mark at all: sim, bom, tempo, também. That is where most of the nasal vowels you read actually come from.
The acute and circumflex both mark stress, and they additionally tell you whether the vowel is open or closed. That is a real distinction in Portuguese and it separates pairs of words that are otherwise spelled identically: avó (grandmother, open o) and avô (grandfather, closed o).
Before m or n the two varieties write different accents for the same word, because the vowel itself sounds different: Brazil writes econômico, tênis and Antônio with a circumflex, Portugal writes económico, ténis and António with an acute. This course writes the Brazilian form, and you will meet the other in anything printed in Portugal.
The cedilla does one job: it keeps c sounding like an s in front of a, o and u, where it would otherwise be hard. It never appears before e or i, because there it would be doing nothing.
The Brazilian signature
One pronunciation habit identifies most Brazilian speakers immediately: d and t before an i sound soften into a palatal sound. So the word for day comes out closer to djia than to dee-a. The same happens with t, which moves towards a ch sound.
The catch is that the i sound is not always written as an i. An unstressed final e is said as i in Brazil, so it palatalises too: noite comes out close to "noitchi", cidade close to "cidadji", leite close to "leitchi". Most of Brazil does this; parts of the North-East and the South keep a plain t and d.
European Portuguese does not do this. It does something else instead, reducing unstressed vowels so heavily that words contract, which is why the two varieties sound so different despite sharing a spelling.
Letters that do not sound like English
The diacritics are only half the story. A handful of plain letters and pairs are read differently from English, and they are where most early mispronunciation comes from. All of these are the Brazilian values:
| spelling | sounds like | examples |
|---|---|---|
| lh | the lli in million | , |
| nh | the ny in canyon | , |
| r at the start of a word, and rr | an English h, from the back of the throat | , |
| r between vowels | a quick tap, like the tt in American butter | , |
| l at the end of a syllable | a w | , , |
| s between vowels | a z | , |
| x | sh most often, but also ks, z or s | , , , |
| final unstressed e | an i | , , |
| final unstressed o | a u | , |
| ão | a nasal "ow" | , , |
Caro (expensive) and carro (car) are a real pair: the single r is a tap, the double one an h.
Stress, and why the accents are worth learning properly
Portuguese stress is predictable from the spelling:
- Words ending in a, e or o (with or without an s), or in -am, - or -ens, are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: casa, cidade, livros, falam, homem.
- Words ending in i or u (with or without an s), in -im or -um, in a nasal ending such as -ão or -ã, or in most consonants (l, r, z) are stressed on the last: aqui, Peru, jardim, algum, irmão, Brasil, falar, feliz.
An accent appears mainly when a word breaks those rules: café and você end in a vowel but are stressed on the last syllable, fácil and táxi on the second-to-last, and every word stressed three syllables from the end carries one (lâmpada, música). Accents also sit on some stressed one-syllable words (pé, já, só), on a vowel that does not join the one beside it (saúde, país), and on a few pairs they keep apart (pôr and por).
That makes the accents genuinely informative rather than decorative. A written accent is telling you something you could not otherwise know, and skipping them in your own writing removes information the reader needs.