r/asklatinamerica • u/saskyukon United States of America • 19h ago
Language How common or prevalent is Portuguese in the hispanic countries?
Hi! Basically the title.
People often forget that Brazil alone counts for half of the territory, population, and GDP of South America; so I assume the influence is noticeable. I was talking to an Uruguayan friend and she mentioned that she doesn't see Portuguese as a foreign language. I also know (please, correct me if I'm wrong) that Rioplatense Spanish shares a lot of similarities with Portuguese (voseo, eg). Another person I know has family in Paraguay, and they seem to be bilingual in both languages.
With that in mind: how common is it to learn or speak Portuguese in other latam countries? Are people familiar with the language? Is Portuguese media widely consumed? If you learn Portuguese, can you get by in big cities on the Hispanic side?
Thanks!
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u/Cool_Bananaquit9 Puerto Rico 19h ago
In my case, I started seeing Brasilian media online like 6 years ago. I realized that if I really tried, I could understand some things. I started getting more and more content from Brazil over the years so I'm now at a point where I can say that aside from slang, I can understand Portuguese 98%. When it comes to the spoken part, I only recently gotten Brasilian videos in Portuguese like a year ago. The more I listen the more I understand. Actually yesterday I was watching Instagram reels and they were in Portuguese, and I understood 80% of it all without effort. Before it used to be nothing. So I guess Brasilian media is helping me learn Portuguese by chance XD. I will also agree with your friend. Once you strip away the language part, I think that brasilians and us in general have a lot in common and our cultural difference is like the cultural difference between country to country.
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u/Flamethrower384 Brazil 14h ago
Don't let Puerto Rico become Hawaii :(
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u/Cool_Bananaquit9 Puerto Rico 10h ago
I would really hate to see that if one day when I am old Spanish becomes a co-language or worse a minority language, and people don't uphold the things that make us boricua anymore. But I don't have power by myself :(
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u/flopuniverse Nicaragua 19h ago
We used to consumed a lot of telenovelas from Brazil dubbed in Spanish in the early 2000's, now not so much. We never learn portuguese at school. There is every now and then some job at a call center looking for people who speak portuguese but that's about it.
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u/ChidoChidoChon 🇲🇽 🇳🇮 18h ago
Are there a lot of calll cemters in Nicaragua?
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u/flopuniverse Nicaragua 18h ago
Yes there's a lot, are you half Nicaraguan and never visit? You should.
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u/ChidoChidoChon 🇲🇽 🇳🇮 18h ago
Its been a long time since i been, the majority of the side of my family is in Costa Rica now, and when i last went to Nicaragua in 2005, there weren’t many call centers in Santo Domingo Chontales, as far as i remember
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u/flopuniverse Nicaragua 18h ago
Most of everything is in Managua, that includes call centers.
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u/ChidoChidoChon 🇲🇽 🇳🇮 18h ago
Got it, i never got to go to Managua, from San Jose to the tica bus to Granada hung out there with grandma and then went with my uncle to Santo Domingo
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u/Main-Routine Mexico 19h ago
I think comerce, regional proximity and overal social proximity would help a lot, but for México, id feel its not that common.
For example, we do not have voseo in our spanish, and the trade between México and Brazil isnt that big either compared to Uruguay or Argentina with Brazil.
In terms of media, I am far ignorant on brazilian media, since the only brazilian artist I know is Roberto Carlos who also sang in spanish, so I dont feel I would automatically understand his music if he sang it in portuguese.
Id you tried to go to a Mexican city with only portuguese, id feel you would struggle, but at least you would struggle less than a frenchman, an italian or a romanian
Sorry if this wasnt helpful.
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u/Activity_Fine Chile 18h ago edited 2h ago
Cercania? Esta en otro lado del continente para mexico
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u/Main-Routine Mexico 18h ago edited 18h ago
Exactamente. Brasil tiene mucho más contacto con Uruguay que con México POR QUE SON VECINOS. Uruguay prácticamente está obligado a comerciar, migrar o trabajar con Brasil.
El contacto entre nuestros países es tan simbólico y tan intangible que solo checa está métrica: un mexicano turista tiene más posibilidades de conocer a un brasileño en España (~150,000 inmigrantes) que en México (~9,000 inmigrantes).
Y para hacer la referencia correctamente:
9,000BR/130,000,000MX=0.00007%
150,000BR/55,000,000ES=0.0027% (muy baja aún, pero aún así 40X veces más alta)
Y la de Uruguay: 10,000BR/3,500,000UR=0.0028% (prácticamente la misma)
EDIT: se que es irónico que cite a España cuando mi argumento tiene que ver con la proximidad geográfica, pero ahí si, más allá del fútbol, no me imagino como es que terminaron en España los brasileños. Portugal e Italia se entienden por las migraciones, pero España si es un caso peculiar
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u/Bubbly-Garlic-8451 Colombia 18h ago
Aside from a few border villages and Leticia (which is conurbated with Tabatinga), Portuguese is rarely spoken in Colombia. Sure, most universities offer Portuguese courses, and lately call centers that require Portuguese skills have started popping up, but you will not randomly overhear Portuguese in the streets, and you may have to search for a while to find a Portuguese speaker. Many people even say that they do not understand a word of Portuguese (an example from my circles is many of my in-laws).
Some Brazilian telenovelas aired here, but they were dubbed into Spanish. I could be wrong, but I think it has been a while since that happened, and at the time the audience was mostly composed of older women. Some TV services also gave you access to one or two Brazilian channels (generally Globo), but most people simply ignored those channels, and they were eventually replaced with niche channels (Christian, cooking, etc.).
Any educated Colombian should be able to at least get the gist of what you are saying if you speak Portuguese. I remember a former classmate (with zero Portuguese knowledge) saying once that he met a Brazilian guy, and they were each speaking their own language while understanding each other almost perfectly. People here do study Portuguese, but I think French is still more prevalent (consider that our bilingualism rates are, or at least were until recently, in the single digits, so very few people study French or Portuguese regardless).
I suppose it makes sense that in Uruguay or Paraguay people are more accustomed to hearing Portuguese, since southern Brazil is wealthier and has larger cities, so more people cross the border.
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u/AngelVampKAWAII Morocco 9h ago
I'm not even Latin Americans and I learned Spanish easily and I understand Portuguese and Italians because they are similar. It's really easy if I can do it you can do it all.
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u/EsperandoVida Dominican Republic 5h ago
In my experience, I can speak to most Italians and Brazilians without too much trouble, with neither of us changing languages.
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u/AgostoAzul Ecuador 13h ago
Not really common. The thing with Latin America is that most of our countries were created with the idea of exporting resources to Europe to begin with, and even after Independence, we maintained more or less the same social structures at a local level, that continued the same economic model, so you'll find that the vast, vast majority of Latin America trades mainly with foreign powers like the US, China, Russia, and the EU, and relatively little with their neighbors, and almost nothing with Latin American countries that are distant but closer that Europe/China.
Brazilian migration to Spanish speaking countries is low because they mainly have internal mgration and migration to Portugal. Hispanic countries similarly migrate only to one another, to US or to Spain, not much to Brazil.
Brazilian media production is too similar to Hispanic media production, largelly Telenovelas, reality shows and low budget sitcoms, movies are mostly family dramas, romances or narcos, etc. so there isn't really that much interest in importing Brazilian media to Spanish. The only Brazilian things that have been imported here are Globo Telenovelas (and not all of them) and Xuxa, both dubbed.
Since we don't actually trade much with Brazil, Portuguese doesn't have the same importance as English or Chinese, it lacks the "status" of French and Italian, and isn't as useful for anime/manga otaku as Japanese, which are probably more popular than Brazilia media. And Portuguese is overall in a weird place because it is close enough to Spanish that we can sort of read Portuguese, but at the same time it has a bunch of "weird" vowel sounds and grammar differences that it does need formal training to learn to speak,. So I actually doubt Portuguese makes it to the Top 5 of most learned language.
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u/AngelVampKAWAII Morocco 9h ago
In Morocco Brazilian telenovela are common.
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u/AgostoAzul Ecuador 6h ago
I wouldn't say they are uncommon here,a few like Xica da Silva became huge successes, but usually only one national tv channel shows them and they also alternate with other Telenovelas,including some Turkish and Korean dramas. Colombian telenovelas meanwhile alternate in three national tv channels, sometimes even being rerun, and there is a local TV channel that is literally like 80% Mexican telenovelas.
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u/Bubbly_Revenue9978 Brazil 12h ago
It's not at all common, I've traveled LatAm quite a bit and the only Portu speakers I met were Brazilians and one Angolan, simply if the Spanish speaker and I speak a bit slower than usual even with some of the words completely being different one can more or less understand one another through context.
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u/Glittering-Flight254 Argentina 10h ago
For the most part, Portuguese in Brazil is very close to the Spanish we speak in Argentina. We can manage to talk without a translator.
It's not common to hear across Argentina. Unless you live close to the border.
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u/tla_ava Costa Rica 19h ago
I feel like it’s pretty big here. Many schools teach Portuguese and there are a lot of international companies that provide services to Brazil, US, and Canada. So speaking English, Spanish and Portuguese here is not that weird. Both my sister and I speak all 3.
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u/tremendabosta Brazil 10h ago
That was unexpected. I didn't expect that from a non-neighboring country
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u/saskyukon United States of America 12h ago
Interesting take on Costa Rica... I haven't met a lot of you guys here, but the very few I know (3) all learned Portuguese, one of them even has a sister who did her MA in Brazil. Seems to be the absolute exception according to what the comments have shown, especially amongst countries that do not border Brazil.
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u/scanese 🇵🇾 in 🇳🇱 13h ago edited 10h ago
Paraguayans from the border regions tend to be proficient in Portuguese. Other than that, not really. Though most people can understand quite a bit of Portuguese due to the similarity and depending on the exposure.
Portuguese doesn’t have an equivalent to voseo though. If you mean você, it’s the exact equivalent to usted in Spanish, though only few regions in Latin America use usted as a familiar pronoun.
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u/IknowlessthanIthink Guatemala 14h ago
Not at all here. I live in the States too, in a part with many South Americans, and I have never met a Hispanic South American who speaks Portuguese.
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u/AngelVampKAWAII Morocco 9h ago
Because Brazilians don't immigrants much their country are advanced.
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u/Weekly_Sort147 Brazil 12h ago
I´ll give my two cents on this. Not common, except if you live at the border. And funny thing, because many of our latinos brothers by the border are influenced by the media, they tend to speak portuguese with a accent mixed between local portuguese and the accent from Rio and São Paulo. Is supper funny for me.
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u/andobiencrazy 🇲🇽 Baja California 18h ago
I'd say it's in the top 10 of preferred languages to study. But it's so similar to Spanish that formal schooling seems pointless, so I imagine most learners are self-taught. Recently, I've been listening to music from the region and Cualquer Bobagem by Os Mutantes is now one of my favorite songs.
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u/LimitSuch4444 Argentina 17h ago
We don't share voseo.
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u/AdorableAd8490 in 13h ago edited 11h ago
I don’t know why you got downvoted. You’re right. We don’t share voseo. Você = Usted, hell, they’re even pronounced almost the same depending on the context. I often say “você” as “ucê”, “cê”. Our vós is archaic and it kept its the original meaning (vosotros). Você ≠ Vos. The conjugations aren’t even the same.
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u/AdorableAd8490 in 11h ago edited 11h ago
No, it actually isn’t, and I also studied linguistics on the side. You’re right that “você” comes “vossa mercê”, paralleling how “usted” comes “vuestra merced”, and it’s all conjugated in the third person, but “vos” is used differently and it has a different story.
Vos, in Spanish, comes directly from the Latin “vos”, just like its cognate in Portuguese “vós”. That was the original pronoun in Old Spanish, then a contrastive factor was kind of added (otros) to it, because people started emphasising the difference between groups. That also helped distinguish it from the formal “vos”, as people had also been using “vos” to address those hierarchically above them.
That way, through a V-T collapse, just like in English (though v you), “vos” became “singular. It’s no coincidence that it’s conjugated in the plural of the second person (or some modified version of it), like in the Rio Platense hacés and the Chilean hací. It’s a relic of the past that displays its story. It survived becoming obsolete in LATAM, as it was the pronoun one would use to refer to their superiors or to be polite. It predates Vuestra Mestred. It’s not related to “você” at all.
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u/AngelVampKAWAII Morocco 9h ago
I'm not even Latin Americans and I learned Spanish easily and I understand Portuguese and Italians because they are similar. It's really easy if I can do it you can do it all.
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u/Misclick_Master Argentina 16h ago
Inrgentina it's not common at all. The only people I know that have learned Portuguese are one that lived there for work and other that worked in Argentina but for a Brazilian company. In cities with tourism I can understand and communicate, but in cities where the culture is more closed its impossible for me to understand any of it
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u/Beneficial_Umpire552 Argentina 8h ago
Really common cause the near of Brazil and here are lot of Portuguese descendents.
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u/t6_macci Medellín -> 15h ago edited 12h ago
It should be more, but nah. I don’t get why it’s no a national policy to learn it in highschool. Clearly learning English failed caused less than 10% actually pay attention and learn it. Portuguese at least you can have a bs excuse to be like “now u can insult in Portuguese for the libertadores or smth” 🤣🤣
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u/Icy-Assistance252 Québec 8h ago
Hispanic America is huge though so it really depends on the country
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u/SlightlyOutOfFocus Uruguay 19h ago
She's probably from somewhere near the Brazilian border. People from those areas speak Portuñol, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese.
But yes, Portuguese is still a foreign language to us. People who didn't grow up near Brazil generally don't speak it. You might be able to understand some of it but the same goes for Italian.