Portuguese Course

With this free course of 289 video lessons you will learn about the most important concepts of Portuguese

The Portuguese language (Portuguese: About this Portuguese sound (?· i)) is a Flexive Romance language, from Galician-Portuguese. After the independence of Portugal in 1139 and the subsequent reconquest to the south, the language was expanding along the limits of present-day Portugal. Likewise, the language was spreading in the period of the discoveries in Brazil, six countries in Africa and other parts of the world.

With approximately 260,000,000 speakers,1 Portuguese is the seventh most spoken mother tongue in the world and the third most spoken language to use the Latin alphabet, after Spanish and English.1 Portuguese is also the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere, with Angola, Mozambique, East Timor and, first, Brazil.

Currently, it is the main language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and East Timor; all these countries make up the Community of Portuguese-speaking countries. It also has a small number of speakers in Macau (although a significant uptick in its use is detected due to trade relations between China and The Lusophone countries) and in Goa; it is also spoken in its Creole form, in some sectors of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia. It is also spoken by large and important colonies of established Portuguese-speaking countries such as Andorra, Luxembourg, Canada, the United States, Namibia, Paraguay, South Africa, France, Japan, Colombia, and Venezuela. In addition to having a high number of speakers in localities of the Spanish-Portuguese border as is the case of Badajoz or La Codosera. [citation needed]

Portuguese is known as the "language of Camões", the author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas and as "the last flower of Lazio", an expression used in the Portuguese Língua sonnet by the Brazilian writer Olavo Bilac. In March 2006 the Museum of the Portuguese Language opened its doors in São Paulo, the city with the largest number of Lusophones in the world.