| About the Portuguese language |
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Stran 1 od 4 Introduction Andragoški zavod Maribor - Ljudska univerza is the author and the coordinator of the Language Festival project. Together with the partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Check Republic, Slovakia and Hungary we applied for financing with EU programme Socrates - Lingua 1. The project received positive feedback and was accepted by European Commission to be implemented between October 2003 and October 2005. In the project we prepared and organised the Language Festival in Maribor from 29th September to 2nd October 2004, held book exhibition of minor European languages, produced a web site and books on chosen languages. The Festival hosted many experts who introduced 24 European languages to general public in 4 days not only at AZM-LU but also at many schools and other institutions. In April 2005 we held book exhibition where we presented books and other materials on 17 minor European languages at Maribor Faculty of Education. We finalised the activities by producing the web site you're using at the moments. Here you can find some information regarding language connected culture, basic characteristics of relevant languages and language survival kits. Website language is Slovenian. Also German and English versions are available. In time we hope to achieve English, German and Esperanto descriptions for all languages. This website is still very much alive and constantly expanding. We plan to add new languages as well. Promotionally the project enjoyed great success. In cooperation with Mediamix we created an innovative way of attracting the public and received many awards at advertising festivals. Socrates Lingua declared the Language Festival project one of 50 best examples of promoting languages. Info regarding promotion of the Festival is available on: http://www.mediamix.si/slo/News/2005junij02.html Melita Cimerman and Zlatko Tišljar. Author: Sofia de Oliveira Portuguese
Portuguese (português) is a Romance language, derived from Latin, spoken in various countries, including Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Spain (as Galician is official in Galicia), Mozambique and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken all over the world and the fifth or sixth most spoken mother-tongue language in the world. Portuguese language speakers are known as Lusitanic or Lusophones. Portuguese developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from the spoken Latin language brought there by Roman soldiers and colonist starting in the 3rd century BC. The language began to differentiate itself from other Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century. From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions. Modern Portuguese still has a large number of words of Arabic origin, especially relating to food, agriculture and crafts, which have no cognates in other Romance languages. The Arabic influence is also visible in placenames throughout the Southern provinces, such as Algarve, Alfama and Fátima. Portuguese started to be used in written documents around the 9th century, and by the 15th century it had become a mature language with a rich literature. The language was spread worldwide in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as Portugal created the first and the longest modern-world colonial and commercial empire (1415–1975), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macau in China and Japan. As a result of that expansion, Portuguese is now the official language of several independent countries, and is widely spoken or studied as a second language in many others. There are still more than 20 Portuguese Creole languages. It is an important minority language in Andorra, Luxembourg and Namibia. Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, e.g. Paris in France, Boston, New Bedford and Newark in the USA. Portuguese is orthographically similar in many ways to Spanish, but is very different in speech. A speaker of one may require some practice to effectively understand a speaker of the other. Portuguese speakers, though, are generally able to read Spanish, and Spanish speakers are generally able to read Portuguese, even if they cannot understand the spoken language. Tourists in Portugal trying to communicate with the locals in Spanish are understood but may seem very offensive. French or English languages should be preferred in Portugal. Galician (Galego) can be seen as a somewhat Spanish-like form of Portuguese. The current Galician Autonomous Government backs a standard variety of Galician which distances it from Portuguese and makes its written form more similar to Spanish. Nevertheless, there is another standard, used in some political circles and universities, that treats Galician as a Portuguese dialect with minor differences. Most linguists have always recognized the unity of these linguistic varieties. During the Middle Ages, Galician and Portuguese were undoubtedly the same language, nowadays known as Portuguese-Galician. The Portuguese language is particularly interesting to linguists because of the complexity of its phonetic structure. The language contains 9 vowels, 5 nasal vowels and 25 consonantal sounds. Also, Portuguese is a "free accentuation language", as distinct pronunciation exists even in the same dialect. Geographic distribution Today the language is official in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and parts of Spain. Total speakers: 202-209 million Portuguese language countries and territories
In sub-Saharan Africa, Portuguese is a growing language and is projected by UNESCO to be one of the most spoken languages within 50 years. As the populations of Angola and Mozambique continue to grow, their influence on Portuguese will becoming increasingly important. Portuguese is also spoken in Asia, especially in East Timor, Goa, Daman and Diu in India, and Macau in China. In Goa, where it is spoken by an increasingly small minority, it is seen as the 'language of grandparents', because it is no longer taught in schools, nor is it an official language. Portuguese is also growing in importance in South America. Because of Brazil, it is being taught - and is popular, especially in Argentina - in the rest of the South American countries that constitute trade block Mercosul. There are 182.1 million people in Brazil who use Portuguese as their main language, but there are also first-language speakers in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, where a hybrid dialect, known as "portuñol" (from português and español) has emerged. It is also spoken in Venezuela. |
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