Comparison of Portuguese and Spanish

Portuguese and Spanish, although closely related Romance languages, differ in many aspects of their phonology, grammar, and lexicon. Both belong to a subset of the Romance languages known as West Iberian Romance, which also includes several other languages or dialects with fewer speakers, all of which are mutually intelligible to some degree.
The most obvious differences between Spanish and Portuguese are in pronunciation. Mutual intelligibility is greater between the written languages than between the spoken forms. Compare, for example, the following sentences—roughly equivalent to the English proverb "A word to the wise is sufficient," or, a more literal translation, "To a good listener, a few words are enough.":
There are also some significant differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese as there are between British and American English or Peninsular and Latin American Spanish. This article notes these differences below only where:
Portuguese and Spanish share a great number of words that are spelled identically or almost identically (although the pronunciation almost always differs), or which often differ in predictable ways. The following paragraph, taken from the Gramática esencial del español, by Manuel Seco (Espasa Calpe, 1989), is contrasted with the literal Portuguese translation below, with notable lexical similarities and differences of word order:
The following sample is taken from the newspaper El País. Because it uses everyday language, it has fewer cognates, making the two languages more distant and resulting in low intelligibility for speakers who have no (formal) knowledge of or exposure to the other language.
While the majority of lexical differences between Spanish and Portuguese come from the influence of the Arabic language on Spanish vocabulary, most of the similarities and cognate words in the two languages have their origin in Latin, meaning that both languages share many common root-word. A significant number of those cognates however, differs semantically: similar words have different meanings. Portuguese has more specific terms and expressions which do not occur, or are not directly translatable in Spanish. Several key differences reflect the unique historical and cultural development of each of these two languages. Levels of understanding in the written forms are much higher than in the spoken forms. Mutual intelligibility is not always possible, and varies greatly on the interlocutors and contexts. Some of the similarities and differences are listed below:
Some words have two forms in one language, but just one in the other:
Significant pairs of cognates have a broader or narrower meaning in one language than in the other, are disused, or their meanings are entirely different. On this basis they are termed "false friends":
Many pairs of cognates have come to have different meanings due to semantic change. These false friends include the following:
A number of the frequent "function words" (pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) are cognates in the two languages but are used in slightly different ways, including the following:
The Spanish pronoun todo can mean 'all/every', or 'everything'. Portuguese distinguishes between todo 'all/every' (masculine) and tudo 'everything' (neuter, used for an indefinite object or abstraction).
Spanish uses an acute accent on interrogative pronouns, while the corresponding relative pronouns (etymologically the same words) are spelled without the accent to mark the difference in prosodic stress. (As explained below, the acute accent often changes the vowel sound in Portuguese, but not Spanish.) For example, ¿quién? (who?) and quien (who) in Spanish, but quem for both in Portuguese. Apart from that, while "quem" is invariable, Spanish has both the singular "quién" and the plural "quiénes". As shown by the examples below, the difference between singular and plural is highlighted by the use of "é" for singular and "são" for plural:
Example 1:
(In the Portuguese examples, the "m" at the end of "quem" is a marker for nasalization (as is the nasal diphthong "ão" in "são". Thus, it is not pronounced.)
Spanish distinguishes the adjective mucho 'much/many' from the adverb muy 'very/quite'. Portuguese uses muito for both (there's also mui, but it is considered old-fashioned). "Mucho" is also an adverb; whereas "muy" modifies adjectives and adverbs, "mucho" modifies verbs, and specific adverbs such as "más"- which can also be a noun sometimes.
As an adjective, muito is inflected according to the gender and number of the noun it qualifies, like mucho. As an adverb, it is invariable like muy. Thus, it would be incorrect to say *muitas maduras in the second example.
The cardinal numbers are very similar in Spanish and Portuguese, but there are differences of usage in numbers one and two. Spanish has different words for the masculine singular indefinite article ('a, an') and the numeral 'one', thus un capítulo 'a chapter', but capítulo uno 'chapter one'. In Portuguese, both words are the same: um capítulo and capítulo um. Spanish uno can also be used as a pronoun, like the English generic "one", to represent an indeterminate subject, but this is not possible with Portuguese um; the reflexive pronoun se must be used instead. Se may be used in Spanish to form passive and impersonal constructions, as well.
This still applies in cases where a relatively indeterminate subject is genderized, such as the Spanish todos a una [voz] ('all at once', literally 'all at one [voice]'). It should be rewritten in Portuguese without any cardinal number. For example, todos juntos 'all together'.
On the other hand, in Portuguese, cardinal number 'two' inflects with gender (dois if masculine, duas if feminine), while in Spanish dos is used for both.
The conjunction "and" in Spanish is y (pronounced [i] before a consonant, [j] before a vowel) before all words except those beginning with an [i] sound (spelled i- or hi-). Before a syllabic [i] sound (and not the diphthong [je] as in hierro), the Spanish conjunction is e [e̞]. Portuguese uses e [i] before all words.
Similarly, for the conjunction "or" Spanish uses o [o̞] before all words except those beginning with o- or ho-, in which case it uses u [w]. Portuguese always uses ou [ow]~[o].
In Portuguese, the word se can be a reflexive pronoun or a conjunction meaning 'if'. This may give the false impression that a Portuguese verb is pronominal when it is not. For example, Se ficou em Paris... means 'If he/she/it stayed in Paris...' When the conjunction se precedes a pronominal verb, it is common to have a double se in the sentence, such as Se se esqueceu da sua senha... 'If you forgot your password...'
Spanish le and les are changed to se when followed by lo, la, los, or las. For example, "Mi abuelo les compró los regalos" becomes "Mi abuelo se los compró". See also "Combining pronouns in Spanish" below. In addition, Spanish uses sé as an irregular verb in the first person singular indicative of saber (to know), and the second person singular imperative of ser (to be). In Portuguese, these are sei and sê respectively.
Despite the mostly cognate vocabulary between Spanish and Portuguese, a significant number of common words are entirely different in the two languages (although in some cases cognates exist, but are rare or archaic in one of the two languages). Examples include the following:
Vocabulary differences between the two languages arose from various factors. Portuguese and Spanish evolved separately from the Middle-Ages onwards and Portuguese being more Atlantic, didn't absorb much Mediterranean influence:
Both Portuguese and, to a lesser degree, Spanish have borrowed loanwords either directly from French or by way of French as an intermediary from other (mostly Greco-Latin) sources. Here are some examples where Portuguese uses French-derived words in everyday situations:
Spanish has significant Mozarabic vocabulary of Arabic origin, whereas Portuguese has markedly less of such influence. In most cases, there will also be a Latin, Gothic or Greek synonym in the Spanish lexicon, although not actively used. Here are a few examples:
Conversely, there are a few examples where a word of Arabic origin is used in Portuguese but not in Spanish, such as: Sp. romero, Port. alecrim (Port. rosmaninho or rosmarinho means 'lavender'), 'rosemary'; Sp. lechuga, Port. alface (in Port. leituga means 'catsear'), 'lettuce'; or more commonly used in Portuguese than in Spanish although the word exists in both languages, such as: chafariz 'fountain' (Port.fonte, Sp. fuente) or garrafa 'bottle' (Port. botelha, Sp. botella) Port. alfaiate (in Port. both costureiro and sartório are also commonly used), Sp. sastre 'tailor'. In a few cases Spanish and Portuguese have both borrowed different Arabic-derived words for the same meaning, such as: Sp. alfombra, Port. alcatifa, 'carpet'; Sp. aduana, Port. alfândega, 'customs' (in Port. aduaneiro is an adjective which means 'of or relating to customs'); the latter is derived from the name of a town in Portugal that once stood on the boundary between Christendom and Islam.
Arabic is the source of a few personal given names and numerous derivative surnames and place names in Spain, including the following:
Almudena, Azucena, Guadalupe, Mohamed, Soraya, Zulema, Abenamir, Abengoa, Avengoa, Abenójar, Alcalá, Almuzara, Acebrón, Aceituno, Aceitón, Aguera, Aguiló, Alamar, Alamino, Alanzor, Albarral, Albarrán, Albo, Alborán, Albaicín, Alcantud, Alcazar, Alcudia, Alguacil, Allobar, Almaguer, Almandós, Almandoz, Almería, Almodóvar, Almoravit, Ambasil, Andujar, Aranda, Ayas, Aias, Benayas, Bardaxí, Benajara, Benameji, Benasar, Bennásar, Benavides, Bendala, Bujalance, Calatayud, Ceuta, Cid, Córdoba, Dris, Faulí, Gálvez, Godesteiz, Granada, Guadalupe, Gudiel, Hispán, Yllán, Illán, Illanes, Iznajar, Jaén, Madrid, Manzaneque, Mezquita, Mezquitas, Mudarra, Palomoque, Trujillo, Zanata, Zaratan, Zarate, Zaratin, Zegrí, Cegrí, Zorita.
Spanish and Portuguese have acquired different words from various Amerindian, African and Asian languages, as in the following examples:
Like with most European languages, both Spanish and Portuguese acquired numerous Greek words mainly related to sciences, arts and humanities:
Unlike the other Romance languages, modern Portuguese does not use the Roman planetary system for the days Monday through Friday. Instead, the weekdays are numerical, and derived from Ecclesiastical Latin. The word feira (from Latin fēria) refers to daily (Roman Catholic) religious celebrations; it is cognate with feira 'fair' or 'market', as well as with férias 'vacation' and feriado 'holiday'. In Spanish, the days of the week are all masculine; in Portuguese, the feira days are feminine, while sábado and domingo are masculine.
Broadly speaking, the grammars of Portuguese and Spanish share many common features. Nevertheless, some differences between them can present hurdles to people acquainted with one and learning the other.
Spanish has three forms for the singular definite article, el, masculine, la, feminine, and lo, neuter. The last is used with adjectives to form abstract nouns employed in a generic sense, and also to intensify the meaning of adjectives. In Portuguese, there is only o, masculine, and a, feminine. Literary Spanish has also three corresponding third person pronouns, él 'he', ella 'she', and ello 'it' (referring to a broad concept, not a named object), while Portuguese has only ele, masculine, and ela, feminine. The Spanish neuters lo and ello have no plural forms.
Some words are masculine in Spanish, but feminine in Portuguese, or vice versa. A common example are nouns ended in -aje in Spanish, which are masculine, and their Portuguese cognates ending in -agem, which are feminine. For example, Spanish el viaje 'the journey' (masculine, like French le voyage and Italian il viaggio) corresponds to the Portuguese feminine a viagem. Similarly, el puente 'bridge', el dolor 'pain', or el árbol 'tree' are masculine nouns in Modern Spanish, whereas a ponte, a dor, and a árvore are feminine in Portuguese. On the other hand, the Spanish feminine la leche 'the milk' corresponds to Portuguese o leite (masculine, like French le lait, Italian il latte). Likewise, nariz 'nose' is feminine in Spanish and masculine in Portuguese.
Some Spanish words can be both masculine and feminine, with different meanings. Both meanings usually exist also in Portuguese, but with one and the same gender, so that they can't be differentiated unless further information is provided. For instance, the word orden 'order' can mean both 'harmonious arrangement' and 'directive', like its counterparts in English and Portuguese. But the Spanish word is masculine when used with the first meaning, and feminine with the second:
In Portuguese, the equivalent word ordem is always feminine:
Without additional context, it is impossible to tell which meaning was intended in Portuguese and English (though other words could be substituted; in English, one would likely use orderliness in the first case above rather than order, which would, by itself, suggest the second case).
In many varieties of Portuguese, personal names are normally preceded by a definite article, a trait also found in Catalan. In Portuguese, this is a relatively recent development, which some Brazilian dialects have not adopted yet, most notably in some states of the Brazilian Northeast. In those dialects of Portuguese that do regularly use definite articles before proper nouns, the article may be omitted for extra formality, or to show distance in a literary narrative. Compare, for example, English "Mary left", Spanish María salió, and Portuguese A Maria saiu. Note, however, that in many Spanish dialects the definite article is used before personal names; thus, la María salió is commonly heard.
Portuguese uses the definite article before the names of some cities and almost all countries except relatively new ones, such as Cingapura/Singapura ('Singapore'), and those related to Portugal (or with which Portugal has historical relationships, even though this is a rough rule) and the Portuguese-speaking countries, e.g., a Holanda but Portugal; o México but Angola, a Suécia, but Moçambique. The major exception to the country rule is o Brasil. In Spanish, use of the definite article is optional with some countries: (la) China, (el) Japón, (la) India, (la) Argentina, (el) Ecuador, (el) Perú, (el) Uruguay, (el) Paraguay, (el) Brasil, (los) Estados Unidos, etc. The same is true with two continents: (la) Antártida and (el) África; with archipelagos and islands: (las) Filipinas, (las) Canarias, (las) Azores, with some provinces, regions or territories: (el) Tíbet, (la) Toscana, (el) Piamonte, (el) Lacio and with some cities: (el) Cairo, (la) Valeta. Spanish uses the definite article with all geographical names when they appear with an adjective or modifying phrase, as in the following examples: la España medieval 'medieval Spain', el Puerto Rico prehispánico 'pre-Hispanic Puerto Rico', el Portugal de Salazar 'Portugal during Salazar's dictatorship', etc.
Portuguese omits the definite article in stating the time of day unless para as is used.
In addition, in most dialects of Portuguese the definite article is used before possessive adjectives (as it is used in Italian), which is not possible in Spanish. For instance, the sentence 'This is my brother' is Este es mi hermano in Spanish, but may be Este é o meu irmão in Portuguese. Nevertheless, in many Brazilian dialects (mostly in the Northeast) and in casual Brazilian Portuguese the article is not used in sentences such as: Este é meu irmão (although it usually reappears in sentences such as "O meu irmão está lá").
In Portuguese, possessive adjectives have the same form as possessive pronouns, and they all agree with the gender of the possessed item. In Spanish, the same is true of nuestro/nuestra ("our") and vuestro/vuestra ("your" [plural]), but for all other possessives, the pronoun has a longer form that agrees with the gender of the possessed item, while the adjective has a shorter form that does not change for gender. The possessive adjectives are normally preceded by a definite article in Continental Portuguese, less so in Brazilian Portuguese, and never in Spanish. The possessive pronouns are preceded by a definite article in all dialects of both languages. See examples in the table below.
In Portuguese, third-person clitic pronouns have special variants used after certain types of verb endings, which does not happen in Spanish. The default object pronouns o/a/os/as change to lo/la/los/las when they follow a verb that ends in ⟨r⟩, ⟨s⟩ or ⟨z⟩, and to no/na/nos/nas when they follow a verb that ends in a nasal sound.
In Brazilian Portuguese, these forms are uncommon, since the pronoun normally precedes the verb (i.e., você o mantenha in the above example), and third-person subject pronouns are used informally as object pronouns (mantenha ele). However, as it has been considered ungrammatical to begin a sentence with an object pronoun, the above examples are, on rare occasion, used in Brazil as well.
European Portuguese differs from Brazilian Portuguese with regard to the placement of clitic personal pronouns, and Spanish is in turn different from both of them.
In Portuguese, verbs in the future indicative or conditional tense may be split into morphemes, and the clitic pronoun can be inserted between them, a feature known as mesoclisis. This also occurred in Old Spanish, but no comparable phenomenon takes place in modern Spanish:
However, these tenses are often replaced with others in the spoken language. Future indicative is sometimes replaced by present indicative; conditional is very often replaced by imperfect indicative. In colloquial language, most Portuguese would state trá-lo-á as vai trazê-lo ('going to bring it') or irá trazê-lo ('will bring it'). In Brazilian Portuguese, "vai trazer ele" would be the vernacular use.
The Spanish construction, se lo dio, means either '[He/She] gave it to [him/her]' or '[He/She] gave it to himself/herself'. The expected pattern for the former would be *le lo dio, but such a construction does not exist. This is unique to Spanish.
Thus, modern Spanish makes no distinction between the reflexive pronoun se and the dative personal pronoun se, whereas in Portuguese it would be "deu-so" for the reflexive pronoun and "deu-lho" for the dative case. Note that this did not happen in old Spanish: diógelo, 'he gave it to him', dióselo, 'he gave it to himself'. The medieval g sound (similar to that of French) was replaced with s in the 14th-15th centuries (cf. Spanish coger, 'to catch', but cosecha, 'harvest', Port. colher and colheita, both from Lat. colligere).
In standard Spanish, stressed pronouns in the subject position are never used for inanimate subjects (i.e., things, as opposed to people or animals), not even for clarity or disambiguation purposes, except when modified by an attribute (él solito may mean 'he by himself' or 'it by itself'). Portuguese knows no such restriction, so that stressed pronouns referring to inanimate subjects can either be used or dropped:
The use of second-person pronouns differs dramatically between Spanish and Portuguese, and even more so between European and Brazilian Portuguese. Spanish tú and usted correspond etymologically to Portuguese tu and você, but Portuguese has gained a third, even more formal form o(s) senhor(es), a(s) senhora(s), demoting você to an "equalizing" rather than respectful register. The old familiar forms have been largely lost in the Portuguese-speaking world, as the Portuguese equalizing forms você or vocês have displaced tu to a large extent and vós almost entirely; and even where tu is still used, the second-person verb forms that historically corresponded to it are often replaced by the same (third-person) forms that are used with "você".
In the plural, Portuguese familiar vós is archaic nearly everywhere (as with the old English second singular "thou"), and both the subject pronoun and its corresponding second-person plural verb forms are generally limited to the Bible, traditional prayers, and spoken varieties of certain regions of rural Portugal; normally, the familiar (and equalizing) form is now vocês, although in Portugal the second person plural forms are retained for both object and possessive pronouns (e.g., vocês e a vossa família). In the case of northern and central Peninsular Spanish, tú, usted, vosotros, and ustedes have more or less kept their original functions; if anything, tú is displacing usted out of common use and usted is coming to be used only for formal situations (like o senhor in Portuguese). Latin American Spanish is more complicated: vosotros has fallen out of use in favor of ustedes, but certain regions of Spanish America also use vos as a singular informal pronoun, displacing tú out of its original role to a greater or lesser extent (see voseo).
Spoken Brazilian Portuguese has dramatically simplified the pronoun system, with você(s) tending to displace all other forms. Although a few parts of Brazil still use tu and the corresponding second-person singular verb forms, most areas either use tu with third-person verb forms or (increasingly) drop tu entirely in favor of você. This has in turn caused the original third-person possessive seu, sua to shift to primarily second-person use, alongside the appearance of a new third-person possessive dele, dela (plural deles, delas, "their") that follows the noun (thus paraphrases such as o carro dele "his car", o carro dela "her car"). The formal o senhor is also increasingly restricted to certain situations, such as that of a storekeeper addressing a customer, or a child or teenager addressing an adult stranger.
More conservative in this regard is the fluminense dialect of Brazilian Portuguese (spoken in Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and in the Zona da Mata of the state of Minas Gerais) – especially its carioca sociolect. This dialect generally preserves intimate or familiar tu, the standard equalizing form você, and the respectful or formal o senhor/a senhora, together with their related possessives, to such an extent that almost all speakers use these forms, according to context. Nevertheless, a minority of educated speakers correctly conjugates all of the tu pronouns formally; otherwise, it is mostly conjugated as você.
Standard Portuguese usage has vocês and os senhores/as senhoras as plurals of você and o senhor/a senhora, but the vernacular has also produced new forms with the second-person familiar plural function, such as gente (compare a gente as a possible colloquial variation of nós, "we"/"us", that should be conjugated—but commonly is not—as third-person singular), pessoas, pessoal, [meu] povo, cês (eye dialect for vocês in colloquial pronunciation), and galera (the latter mainly associated with youth slang).
It is often said that the gaúcho, nordestino and amazofonia dialects, as well as some sociolects elsewhere, such as that in and around the city of Santos, have preserved tu; but unlike in fluminense, the use of você is very limited, and entirely absent among some speakers, and tu takes its place. In these areas, the verb with tu is conjugated in the third-person form (as with você) – except among educated speakers in some urban centers such as Porto Alegre and, especially, Belém. See Brazilian Portuguese.
Spanish and Portuguese have two main copulas, ser and estar. For the most part, the use of these verbs is the same in both languages, but there are a few cases where it differs. The main difference between Spanish and Portuguese is in the interpretation of the concept of state versus essence and in the generalizations one way or another that are made in certain constructions. For instance,
Also, the use of ser regarding a permanent location is much more accepted in Portuguese. Conversely, estar is often permanent in Spanish regarding a location, while in Portuguese, it implies being temporary or something within the immediate vicinity (same house, building, etc.)
Because the airport is obviously not anywhere nearby, ficar is used in Portuguese (most common), though ser can also be used.
Secondary copulas are quedar(se) in Spanish and ficar in Portuguese. Each can also mean 'to stay' or 'to remain.'
The Spanish sentence using the reflexive form of the verb (quedarse) implies that staying inside the house was voluntary, while Portuguese and English are quite ambiguous on this matter without any additional context. (See also the next section.)
Both Spanish quedar(se) and Portuguese ficar can mean 'become':
Reflexive verbs are somewhat more frequent in Spanish than in Portuguese, especially with actions relating to parts of the body:
The Portuguese and Spanish verbs for expressing "liking" are similar in form (gostar and gustar respectively) but different in their arrangement of arguments. Arguments in linguistics are expressions that enable a verb to complete its meaning. Expressions of liking typically require two arguments: (1) a person who likes something (sometimes called the "experiencer"), and (2) something that the person likes (sometimes called the "theme"). Portuguese and Spanish (as well as English) assign different grammatical cases to these arguments, as shown in the following table:
The Portuguese sentence can be translated literally as "[I] [take satisfaction] [from] [the music]", while the Spanish corresponds to "[To me] [(it) is pleasing] [the music]."
It is also possible in Spanish to express it as: "(Yo) gusto de la música", although this use has become antiquated.
In Spanish, the compound perfect is constructed with the auxiliary verb haber (< Latin habēre). Although Portuguese used to use its cognate verb (haver) in this way, now it is more common to form these tenses with ter ('to have') (< Latin tenēre). While ter is occasionally used as an auxiliary by other Iberian languages, it is much more pervasive in Portuguese - to the extent that most Portuguese verb tables only list ter with regard to the perfect.
A class of false friends between the two languages is composed of the verb forms with endings containing -ra-, such as cantara, cantaras, cantáramos, and so on. Spanish has two forms for the imperfect subjunctive, one with endings in -se- and another with endings in -ra- (e.g., cantase/cantara 'were I to sing'), which are usually interchangeable. In Portuguese, only cantasse has this value; cantara is employed as a pluperfect indicative, i.e., the equivalent to Spanish había cantado ('I had sung'). Although there is a strong tendency to use a verb phrase instead in the spoken language, like in Spanish and English (havia cantado), the simple tense is still frequent in literature.
In European Spanish, as well as some Andean dialects, as in English, the present perfect is normally used to talk about an action initiated and completed in the past, which is still considered relevant or influential in the present moment. In Portuguese and Latin American Spanish, the same meaning is conveyed by the simple preterite, as in the examples below:
Portuguese normally uses the present perfect (pretérito perfeito composto) for speaking of an event that began in the past, was repeated regularly up to the present, and could keep happening in the future. See the contrast with Spanish in the following example:
As this example suggests, the Portuguese present perfect is often closer in meaning to the English present perfect continuous. See also Spanish verbs: Contrasting the preterite and the perfect.
Portuguese, uniquely among the major Romance languages, has acquired a "personal infinitive", which can be used as an alternative to a subordinate clause with a finite verb in the subjunctive.
The Portuguese perfect form of the personal infinitive corresponds to one of several possible Spanish finite verbs.
On some occasions, the personal infinitive can hardly be replaced by a finite clause and corresponds to a different structure in Spanish (and English):
The personal infinitive is not used in counterfactual situations, as these require either the future subjunctive or the imperfect subjunctive. 'If we were/had been rich...' is Se fôssemos ricos..., not *Se sermos ricos... Also, it is conjugated the same as the future subjunctive (see next section), provided the latter is not irregular (ser, estar, ter, etc.) The personal infinitive is never irregular, though the circumflex accent may be dropped in writing on expanded forms (such as pôr).
In the first and third person singular, the personal infinitive appears no different from the unconjugated infinitive.
The above rules also apply whenever the subjects of the two clauses are the same, but independent of each other.
As shown, the personal infinitive can be used at times to replace both the impersonal infinitive and the subjunctive. Spanish has no such alternative.
The future subjunctive, now virtually obsolete in Spanish, or circumscribed to legal documents, continues in use in both written and spoken Portuguese. It is used in subordinate clauses referring to a hypothetical future event or state – either adverbial clauses (usually introduced by se 'if ' or quando 'when') or adjective clauses that modify nouns referring to a hypothetical future entity. Spanish, in the analogous if-clauses, uses the present indicative, and in the cuando- and adjective clauses uses the present subjunctive.
In the preterite tense, a number of irregular verbs in Portuguese change the stem vowel to indicate differences between first and third person singular: fiz 'I did' vs. fez 'he did', pude 'I could' vs. pôde 'he could', fui 'I was' vs. foi 'he was', tive 'I had' vs. teve 'he had', etc. Historically, these vowel differences are due to vowel raising (metaphony) triggered by the final -ī of the first-person singular in Latin. Spanish maintains such a difference only in fui 'I was' vs. fue 'he was'. In all other cases in Spanish, the stem vowel has been regularized throughout the conjugation and a new third-person ending -o adopted: hice 'I did' vs. hizo 'he did', pude 'I could' vs. pudo 'he could', etc. Portuguese verbs ending in -duzir are regular in the preterite, while their Spanish counterparts in -ducir undergo a consonant change and are stressed on the stem; thus Portuguese reduzi vs. Spanish reduje ('I reduced'). Similarly, the preterite of andar is regular in Portuguese (andaste), but irregular in Spanish (anduviste, 'you went').
Meanwhile, Spanish maintains many more irregular forms in the future and conditional: saldré 'I will leave', pondré 'I will put', vendré 'I will come', diré 'I will say', etc. Portuguese has only three: farei 'I will do', direi 'I will say', trarei 'I will carry'.
In the imperfect tense, Spanish has three irregular verbs while Portuguese has four; ser (to be) is the only such verb that is irregular in the imperfect across both languages. While the counterparts of the Spanish verbs tener (to have), poner (to put), and venir (to come) are irregular in Portuguese, the counterparts of the Portuguese verbs ir (to go) and ver (to see) are irregular in Spanish.
Portuguese drops -e in "irregular" third-person singular present indicative forms after ⟨z⟩ and ⟨r⟩, according to phonological rules: faz 'he does', diz 'he says', quer 'he wants', etc. Spanish has restored -e by analogy with other verbs: hace 'he does', dice 'he says', quiere 'he wants', etc. (The same type of analogy accounts for fiz vs hice 'I did' in the past tense. In nouns such as paz 'peace', luz 'light', amor 'love', etc. -e was dropped in both languages and never restored).
In Spanish the prepositions a ('to') and de ('of, from') form contractions with a following masculine singular definite article (el 'the'): a + el > al, and de + el > del. This kind of contraction is much more extensive in Portuguese, involving the prepositions a ('to'), de ('of, from'), em ('in'), and por ('for') with articles and demonstratives regardless of number or gender. All four of these prepositions join with the definite article, as shown in the following table:
These Portuguese contractions include some potential "false friends" for the reader of Spanish, such as no (Port. 'in the', Sp. 'no, not') and dos (Port. 'of the', Sp. 'two'). These Portuguese contractions have different meanings in Spanish, but their Portuguese cognates are spelled with diacritics; pelo (Port. 'for the', Sp. 'hair' (equivalent to Port. pêlo)) and nos (Port. 'in the', Sp. 'ourselves' (equivalent to Port. nós)). In European Portuguese, a is pronounced [ɐ], while à is pronounced [a]. Both are generally [a] in most of Brazil, although in some accents such as carioca and florianopolitano there may be distinction.
Additionally, the prepositions de and em combine with the demonstrative adjectives and pronouns as shown below:
The neuter demonstrative pronouns (isto 'this' isso, aquilo 'that') likewise combine with de and em – thus, disto, nisto, etc. And the preposition a combines with the "distal" demonstratives (those that begin with a-) to form àquele, àquilo, etc.
The Portuguese contractions mentioned thus far are obligatory. Contractions can also be optionally formed from em and de with the indefinite article (um, uma, uns, umas), resulting in num, numa, dum, duma, etc. and from the third person pronouns (ele, ela, eles, elas), resulting in nele, nela, dele, dela, etc. Other optional contractions include de with aqui > daqui ('from here').
The Spanish con ('with', com in Portuguese) combines with the prepositional pronouns mí, ti, and sí to form conmigo, contigo, consigo ('with me', 'with you', 'with him-/herself '). In Portuguese this process not only applies to the pronouns mim, ti, and si (giving comigo, contigo, and consigo), but also is extended to nós and, in those varieties which use it, vós, producing connosco (conosco in Brazilian Portuguese) and convosco.
Spanish employs a preposition, the so-called "personal a", before the direct object of a transitive verb (except tener) when it denotes a specific person(s), or domestic pet; thus Veo a Juan 'I see John'; Hemos invitado a los estudiantes 'We've invited the students.' In Portuguese, personal a is virtually non-existent, except before Deus 'God': louvar a Deus 'to praise God', amar a Deus 'to love God'.
Quite common in both languages are the prepositions a (which often translates as "to") and para (which often translates as "for"). However, European Portuguese and Spanish distinguish between going somewhere for a short while versus a longer stay, especially if it is an intended destination, in the latter case using para instead of a. While there is no specified duration of stay before a European Portuguese speaker must switch prepositions, a implies one will return sooner, rather than later, relative to the context. This distinction is not made in English and Brazilian Portuguese. In Spanish the distinction is not made if the duration is given in the context (maybe implicitly), and in this case a is generally preferred.
Note, though, in the first example, para could be used in Portuguese if in contrast to a very brief period of time.
In informal, non-standard Brazilian Portuguese, em (in its original form or combined with a given article in a contraction, yielding no, na, numa, etc.), often replaces the preposition a from standard Portuguese.
Such a construction is not used in Spanish or in European Portuguese.
In Portuguese the preposition até can also be used when the duration of the stay is expected to be short or when there is a specific reason for going somewhere. In Spanish hasta has the same meaning and function.
Spanish has two prepositions of direction: para ('for', including 'headed for [a destination]') and hacia ('toward [not necessarily implying arrival]'). Of them, only para exists in Portuguese, covering both meanings.
Colloquially, para is often reduced in both languages: to pa in Spanish, and to pra (sometimes written p'ra and this form may be used in literature) or pa (only in slang in Portugal and Rio de Janeiro, and not permitted in writing) in Portuguese. Portuguese pra, in turn, may join with the definite article: pra + o > pro (BP) or prò (EP), pra + a > pra (BP) or prà (EP), etc. In reference to the slang option pa, these become: pa + o > pò, pa + a > pà, etc.
Both languages have a construction similar to the English "going-to" future. Spanish includes the preposition a between the conjugated form of ir "to go" and the infinitive: Vamos a cantar "We're going to sing" or "Let's sing" (present tense of ir + a + infinitive). Usually, in Portuguese, there is no preposition between the helping verb and the main verb: Vamos cantar (present tense of ir + infinitive). This also applies when the verb is in other tenses:
While as a rule the same prepositions are used in the same contexts in both languages, there are many exceptions.
The traditional Spanish alphabet had 28 letters, while the Portuguese one had 23. Modern versions of recent years added k and w (found only in foreign words) to both languages. Portuguese also added y for loanwords.
With the reform in 1994 by the 10th congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies, Spanish alphabetization now follows the same pattern as that of other major West European languages. Prior to this date, however, the digraphs ch and ll were independently alphabetized. For example, the following surnames would be put in this order: Cervantes, Contreras, Cruz, Chávez, Dávila. Many Spanish dictionaries and other reference material still exist using the pre-reform rule of alphabetization.
⟨Sc⟩ in Latin American Spanish is not called a digraph, however it is a single sound as in Brazilian Portuguese. Also Spanish has taken ⟨sh⟩ /ʃ/ from English as a loan sound; e.g., sherpa, show, flash (however, the Royal Spanish Academy prescribes these words to be written in italics, as unadapted foreign words). Brazilian Portuguese uses the trigraph ⟨tch⟩ /tʃ/ for loanwords; e.g., tchau, 'ciao', tcheco 'Czech', República Tcheca 'Czech Republic', tchê 'che' (this latter is regional), etc. European Portuguese normally replace the trigraph ⟨tch⟩ with ⟨ch⟩ /ʃ/: chau, checo, República Checa, etc. (This is pronounced /tʃ/ in northern European Portuguese dialects.)
Both Spanish and Portuguese use ⟨zz⟩ /ts/ (never as /dz/ – this sequence appears only in loanwords from Japanese, e.g., adzuki) for some Italian loanwords, but in Portuguese may sometimes not be pronounced as affricate, but having an epenthetic /i/ or /ɨ/; e.g., Sp. and Port. pizza 'pizza', Sp. and Port. paparazzo 'paparazzo', etc. (however, the Royal Spanish Academy prescribes these words to be written in italics). Spanish also utilizes ⟨tz⟩ /ts/ for Basque, Catalan and Nahuatl loanwords, and ⟨tl⟩ /tɬ/ (or /tl/) for Nahuatl loanwords; e.g., Ertzaintza, quetzal, xoloitzcuintle, Tlaxcala, etc. Portuguese utilizes ⟨ts⟩ for German, originarily ⟨z⟩, and Japanese loanwords.
Although the letters k, w, and y are now included in the Portuguese alphabet, according to the current orthographic rules they should only be used in proper names (foreign or invented) and their derivatives with suffixes (kantiano, darwinismo, byroniano, etc.), and also in international symbols. Derivatives without suffixes are generally adapted to the Portuguese spelling (Karakul but caracul, Zika but zica), except measurement units (watt, henry; note also kwanza, the monetary unit of Angola). On the other hand, the current Spanish orthography allows k and w to be used in any kind of loanwords, although in some cases alternative spellings are allowed (kimono or quimono). This leads to differences in Spanish and Portuguese spellings of loanwords:
Spanish: búnker, chikunguña, karaoke, kárate/karate, karma, kilogramo, kilómetro, kiwi, koala, sándwich, wiski/güisqui, zika. Portuguese: búnquer, chicungunha, caraoquê, caraté/caratê, carma, quilograma, quilómetro/quilômetro, quivi/quiuí, coala, sanduíche, uísque, zica.
In practice, foreign words are often left unchanged in both languages, e. g. whisky, chikungunya. The Royal Spanish Academy accepts such spellings, but only with typographical emphasis: italics in printed text, quotation marks in manuscript or when italics are not available.
On the other hand, names of measurement units named after people are written unchanged in Portuguese, but Spanish often uses adapted spellings ending in -io:
Portuguese: watt, henry, hertz. Spanish: vatio, henrio, hercio.
The silent letter h is used in Spanish word-initially and word-medially (hombre, prohibir), but in Portuguese it is used only word-initially (homem but proibir). Word-final h is used in both languages in interjections (ah, oh); in Spanish it is used also in the loanword sah (which corresponds to Portuguese xá).
Only in Spanish do interrogatives and exclamations use the question mark or exclamation point respectively at the beginning of a sentence. The same punctuation marks are used, but these are inverted. This prepares the reader in advance for either a question or exclamation type of sentence.
On the other hand, in Portuguese, a person reading aloud lengthy sentences from an unfamiliar text may have to scan ahead to check if what at first appears to be a statement, is actually a question. Otherwise, it would be too late to enable proper voice inflection. Neither language has the equivalent of the auxiliary verb to do, which is often used to begin a question in English. Both Spanish and English can place the verb before the subject noun to indicate a question, though this is uncommon in Portuguese, and almost unheard of in Brazil. In fact, most yes/no questions in Portuguese are written the same as a statement except for the final question mark.
Aside from changes of punctuation in written language, in speech, converting any of the above examples from a question to a statement would involve changes of both intonation and syntax in English and Spanish, but intonation only in Portuguese.
The palatal consonants are spelled differently in the two languages.
The symbols ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨ñ⟩ are etymological in Spanish, as the sounds they represent are often derived from Latin ll and nn (for those positions, Portuguese has simple ⟨l⟩ and ⟨n⟩; cf. rodilla/rodela, peña/pena). The Portuguese digraphs ⟨lh⟩ and ⟨nh⟩ were adopted from Occitan, as poetry of the troubadours was the most important influence on Portuguese literature up until the 14th century. King Denis of Portugal, who established Portuguese instead of Latin as the official language, was an admirer of the poetry of the troubadours and a poet himself. Examples include names such as Port. Minho (Sp. Miño) and Magalhães (Sp. Magallanes).
The letter ⟨y⟩ was used in Portuguese from the 16th to the early 20th century in Greek loans, much as in English (e.g., Psychologia, modern Psicologia 'Psychology'). The orthographic reform in 1911 officially replaced it with ⟨i⟩. The corresponding sound can be regarded as an allophone of the vowel /i/ in both languages. Compare Sp. rey ('king'), mayor ('larger, greater, elder') with Port. rei ('king'), maior ('larger, greater').
The exact pronunciation of these three consonants varies somewhat with dialect. The table indicates only the most common sound values in each language. In most Spanish dialects, the consonants written ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨y⟩ have come to be pronounced the same way, a sound merger known as yeísmo. A similar phenomenon can be found in some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (e.g., "muié" for mulher, 'woman'), but it is much less widespread than in Spanish.
The Portuguese letter ⟨ç⟩ (c-cedilha), based on a Visigothic form of the letter ⟨z⟩: "ꝣ". In Portuguese it is used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩ (including nasals), and never at the beginning or end of any word. It always represents the "soft c" sound, namely [s]. In modern Spanish, it has been replaced by ⟨z⟩. Example: calzado (Sp.), calçado (Port.) 'footwear'.
Various word endings are consistently different in the two languages.
Both languages use diacritics to mark the stressed syllable of a word whenever it is not otherwise predictable from spelling. Since Spanish does not differentiate between mid-open and mid-close vowels and nasal vowels, it uses only one accent, the acute. Portuguese usually uses the acute accent ( ´ ), but also uses the circumflex accent ( ˆ ) on the mid-close vowels ⟨ê⟩ and ⟨ô⟩ and the stressed (always nasal in Brasil) ⟨â⟩.
Although the Spanish ⟨y⟩ can be either a consonant or a vowel, as a vowel it never takes an accent. At the end of a word, the Portuguese diphthong -ai is the equivalent of the Spanish -ay, however, -ai can have an accent on the ⟨í⟩ to break the diphthong into two separate vowels, e.g., açaí (three syllables). Without the accent, as in Spanish, the last syllable would be a diphthong: Paraguai (Portuguese) and Paraguay (Spanish) 'Paraguay'.
Portuguese nasal vowels occur before ⟨n⟩ and ⟨m⟩ (see phonology below) without an accent mark, as these consonants are not fully pronounced in such cases. The tilde (~), is only used on nasal diphthongs such as ⟨ão⟩ [ɐ̃w̃] and ⟨õe⟩ [õj̃], plus the final ⟨ã⟩ [ɐ̃], which replaces the -am ending, as the latter is reserved for verbs, e.g., amanhã [amɐˈɲɐ̃] 'tomorrow'.
These do not alter the rules for stress, though note endings -im, -ins and -um, -uns are stressed, as are their non-nasal counterparts (see below). A couple of two-letter words consist of only the nasal vowel: em and um.
Phonetic vowel nasalization occurs in Spanish—vowels may get slightly nasalized in contact with nasal consonants—but it is not phonemically distinctive. In Portuguese, on the other hand, vowel nasalization is distinctive, and therefore phonemic: pois /ˈpojs/ or /ˈpojʃ/ 'because' vs pões /ˈpõj̃s/ or /ˈpõj̃ʃ/ '(you) put'.
Portuguese changes vowel sounds with (and without) accents marks. Unaccented ⟨o⟩ (/u/, /o/, /ɔ/) and ⟨e⟩ (/i/, /ɨ/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ɐ/), acute accented ⟨ó⟩ (/ɔ/) and ⟨é⟩ (/ɛ/), or circumflex accented ⟨ô⟩ (/o/) and ⟨ê⟩ (/e/). Thus, nós [ˈnɔs] or [ˈnɔʃ] 'we' vs nos [nus] or [nuʃ] 'us', avô [aˈvo] 'grandfather' vs avó [aˈvɔ] 'grandmother', se [si] or [sɨ] 'itself, himself, herself' reflexive pronoun vs sé [ˈsɛ] 'seat, headquarters' vs sê [ˈse] 'to be' 2nd person imperative. Spanish pronunciation makes no such distinction.
The grave accent ( ` ) is also used in Portuguese to indicate the contraction of the preposition a (to) with a few words beginning with the vowel a, but not to indicate stress. In other cases, it is the combination of the preposition and the feminine definite article; in other words, the equivalent of a la ('to the') in Spanish. Às is used for the plural (a las in Spanish).
The diaeresis or trema ( ¨ ) is used in Spanish to indicate ⟨u⟩ is pronounced in the sequence ⟨gu⟩; e.g., desagüe [deˈsaɣwe]. As the Portuguese grave accent, the trema does not indicate stress. In Brazilian Portuguese it was also used for the digraphs ⟨gu⟩ and ⟨qu⟩ for the same purpose as Spanish (e.g., former BP spelling *qüinqüênio [kwĩˈkwẽɲu], EP quinquénio [kwĩˈkwɛnju] 'five-year period'), however since the implementation of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement in Brazil, the trema was abolished (current BP spelling quinquênio [kwĩˈkwẽɲu]), and its usage was restricted to some loanwords (e.g., mülleriano 'Müllerian').
The accentuation rules (including those of predictable stress) of Portuguese and Spanish are similar, but not identical. Discrepancies are especially pervasive in words that contain i or u in their last syllable. Note the Portuguese diphthongs ei and ou are the approximate Spanish equivalent of e and o respectively, but any word ending with these diphthongs is, by default, stressed on its final syllable.
Compare the following pairs of cognates, where the stress falls on the same syllable in both languages:
Semivowel–vowel sequences are treated differently in both languages when it comes to accentuation rules. A sequence of a semivowel adjacent to a vowel is by default assumed to be read as a diphthong (part of the same syllable) in Spanish, whereas it is by default assumed to be read as a hiatus (belonging to different syllables) in Portuguese. For both languages, accentuation rules consistently indicate something other than the default.
A consequence of this is that words that are pronounced alike in both languages are written according to different accentuation rules. Some examples:
Another consequence (though less common) is that some words are written exactly (or almost exactly) the same in both languages, but the stress falls on different syllables:
Although the vocabularies of Spanish and Portuguese are similar, the two languages differ phonologically from each other, very likely because of the stronger Celtic substratum in Portuguese. Phonetically Portuguese bears similarities to French and to Catalan while the phonetics of Spanish are more comparable to those of Sardinian and Sicilian. Portuguese has a significantly larger phonemic inventory than Spanish. This may partially explain why Portuguese is generally not very intelligible to Spanish speakers despite the lexical similarity between the two languages.
One of the main differences between the Spanish and Portuguese pronunciation are the vowel sounds. Standard Spanish has a basic vowel phonological system, with five phonemic vowels (/a/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/). Phonetic nasalization occurs in Spanish for vowels occurring between nasal consonants or when preceding a syllable-final nasal consonant (/n/ and /m/), but it is not distinctive as in Portuguese. Dialectally, there are Spanish dialects with a greater number of vowels, with some (as Murcian and Eastern Andalusian) reaching up to 8 to 10 vowel sounds. On the other hand, Portuguese has seven to nine oral vowels (/a/, /ɐ/*, /e/, /ɛ/, /ɨ/*, /i/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/) (/ɐ/ is closer to [ə] in Portugal, while the near-close near-back unrounded vowel /ɨ/—also rendered as [ɯ̟] or [ʊ̜]—is only found in European Portuguese) plus five phonemic nasal vowels (/ɐ̃/, /ẽ/, /ĩ/, /õ/, /ũ/) when preceding an omitted syllable-final nasal (⟨n⟩ and ⟨m⟩) or when is marked with a tilde (~): ⟨ã⟩ and ⟨õ⟩. This appears to be, similarly to French, a Celtic phonological adaptation to Latin. Portuguese, as Catalan, uses vowel height, contrasting stressed and unstressed (reduced) vowels. Moreover, Spanish has two semivowels as allophones, [j, w]; while Portuguese has four, two oral [i̯ ~ ɪ̯], [u̯ ~ ʊ̯] and two nasalized glides [j̃ ~ ɪ̯̃], [w̃ ~ ʊ̯̃] (non-syllabic near-close vowels, as those of most English speech, are allophones of the glides in the Brazilian dialects where near-closeds are used).
The following considerations are based on a comparison of standard versions of Spanish and Portuguese. Apparent divergence of the information below from anyone's personal pronunciation may indicate one's idiolect (or dialect) diverges from the mentioned standards. Information on Portuguese phonology is adapted from Celso Pedro Luft (Novo Manual de Português, 1971), and information on Spanish phonology adapted from Manuel Seco (Gramática Esencial del Español, 1994).
Comparing the phonemic inventory of the two languages, a noticeable divergence stands out. First, standard Portuguese has more phonemes than Spanish. Also, each language has phonemes that are not shared by the other.
Spanish and Portuguese have been diverging for over a thousand years. One of the most noticeable early differences between them concerned the result of the stressed vowels of Latin:
The vowels /a/ and /ɐ/ occur largely in complementary distribution. This diphthong has been reduced to the monophthong /o/ in many dialects of modern Portuguese.
As vowel length ceased to be distinctive in the transition from Latin to Romance, the stressed vowels e and o became ie and ue in Spanish whenever they were short (Latin petra → Spanish piedra 'stone'; Latin moritvr → Spanish muere "he dies"). Similar diphthongizations can be found in other Romance languages (French pierre, Italian pietra, Romanian piatră; French meurt, Italian muore, Romanian moare), but in Galician-Portuguese these vowels underwent a qualitative change instead (Portuguese/Galician pedra, morre), becoming lower, as also happened with short i and short u in stressed syllables. The Classical Latin vowels /e/-/eː/ and /o/-/oː/ were correspondingly lowered in Spanish and turned into diphthongs /je̞/ and /we̞/. In Spanish, short e and o and long ē and ō merged into mid vowels, /e̞/ and /o̞/, while in Portuguese these vowels stayed as close-mid, /e/ and /o/ and open-mid, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/, as in Vulgar Latin.
Portuguese has five phonemic nasal vowels (/ɐ̃/, /ẽ/, /ĩ/, /õ/, /ũ/), which, according to historical linguistics, arose from the assimilation of the nasal consonants /m/ and /n/, often at the end of syllables. Syllable-final m and n are still written down to indicate nasalization, even though they are no longer fully pronounced, that is, either [ⁿ] (before obstruents) or elided completely. In other cases, nasal vowels are marked with a tilde (ã, õ). Not all words containing vowel + n have the nasal sound, as the subsequent letter must be a consonant for this to occur: e.g., anel /ɐˈnɛw/ ('ring') –oral/non-nasal– vs anca /ˈɐ̃kɐ/ ('hip') –nasal–.
However, in some Brazilian dialects, most vowels (including the allophones present only in unstressed environment) have nasal allophones before one of the nasal consonants /m/, /n/, /ɲ/, followed by another vowel. In other Brazilian dialects, only stressed vowels can be nasalized this way. In European Portuguese, nasalization is absent in this environment.
The Portuguese digraph ou (pronounced usually as the diphthong [ow], but sometimes as a monophthong [o]) corresponds to the final -ó of Spanish -ar verbs in the preterite tense; e.g., Spanish descansó and Portuguese descansou ("he/she rested"). The Spanish irregular verb forms in -oy (e.g., doy "I give", estoy "I am", soy "I am", voy "I go") correspond to Portuguese forms in -ou (e.g., dou, estou, sou, vou). But in some other words, conversely, Spanish o corresponds to Portuguese oi, e.g., Spanish cosa, Portuguese coisa "thing"; Spanish oro "gold", Portuguese usually ouro, but sometimes oiro.
Stressed vowel alternations may occur in Portuguese, but not in Spanish:
A 1949 study by the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree to which seven Romance languages diverged from Vulgar Latin with respect to their accent vocalization, yielded the following measurements of divergence (with higher percentages indicating greater divergence from the stressed vowels of Vulgar Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%. Of relevance here, Pei's results mark the Spanish language's stressed vowels as more conservative than those of Portuguese.
Pei's study emphasized, however, that it represented only "a very elementary, incomplete and tentative demonstration" of how statistical methods could measure linguistic change, assigned "frankly arbitrary" point values to various types of change, and did not compare languages in the sample with respect to any characteristics or forms of divergence other than stressed vowels, among other caveats.
The history of the unstressed vowels in Spanish and Portuguese is not as well known as that of the stressed vowels, but some points are generally agreed upon. Spanish has the five short vowels of classical Latin, /a/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/. It has also two semivowels, [j] and [w], that appear in diphthongs, but these can be considered allophones of /i/ and /u/, respectively. The pronunciation of the unstressed vowels does not differ much from that of stressed vowels. Unstressed, non-syllabic /e̞/ /o̞/, and /a/ can be reduced to [ʝ], [w̝] and complete elision in some dialects; e.g., poetisa [pw̝e̞ˈtisa] ('poet' f.), línea [ˈlinʝa] ('line'), ahorita [o̞ˈɾita] ('now').
The system of seven oral vowels of Vulgar Latin has been fairly well preserved in Portuguese, as in the closely related Galician language. In Portuguese, unstressed vowels have been more unstable, both diachronically (across time) and synchronically (between dialects), producing new vowel sounds. The vowels written ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ are pronounced in different ways according to several factors, most notably whether they are stressed, and whether they occur in the last syllable of a word. The basic paradigm is shown in the following table (it has some exceptions).
Always nasalized in this environment in most dialects, that is, [ɐ̃ ~ ə̃]
Mostly in Northeastern Brazil. In some other dialects (including those of northern Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais and the Brazilian Federal District), this also occurs if the stressed vowel is open rather than closed (/ɛ/ or /ɔ/, rather than /e/ or /o/) due to vowel harmony.
Only in some dialects, the first mainly in the area including and surrounding Lisbon (not present in much of northern and insular Portugal, as in Brazil), and the latter mainly in some hinterland northern Portuguese accents (not present in southern and insular Portugal, as in Brazil)
Brazilian unstressed vowel allophones vary according to the geographical region of the country. Near-close [ʊ], [ɪ] and unstressed close-mid [e], [o] are found in southern and western accents, where postvocalic /r/ has a "soft" allophone (a flap, a coronal approximant, or a rhotic vowel), and postvocalic sibilants (written ⟨s⟩, ⟨x⟩, and ⟨z⟩) in native words are always alveolar [s, z]. Meanwhile, these close allophones do not occur in the northern and eastern accents, where postvocalic /r/ has a "hard" allophone (velar, uvular, or glottal) and postvocalic sibilants may be, consistently or not, post-alveolar [ʃ, ʒ, ɕ, ʑ]. In the accents where postvocalic sibilants are always post-alveolar, such as those of Florianópolis and Rio de Janeiro, or in the accents influenced by them, any unstressed /a ~ ɐ/, [e̞ ~ ɛ] and [o̞ ~ ɔ] may be raised (like in Portugal), to [ɐ], [i] and [u], respectively. While this is true of all colloquial BP, it is especially characteristic of the latter dialects). This increased vowel reduction is also present in accents of the Brazilian Northeast, particularly from Alagoas to Piauí.
Similar alternation patterns to these exist in other Romance languages such as Catalan and Occitan. Although it is mostly an allophonic variation, some dialects have developed minimal pairs that distinguish the stressed variants from the unstressed ones. The vowel /ɨ/ is often elided in connected speech (it is not present in Brazilian Portuguese).
Some Brazilian dialects diphthongize stressed vowels to [ai̯], [ɛi̯], [ei̯], etc. (except /i/), before a sibilant at the end of a syllable (written ⟨s⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨z⟩, or rarely, ⟨sh⟩). For instance, Jesus [ʒe̞ˈzui̯s] 'Jesus', faz [ˈfai̯s] 'he does', dez [ˈdɛi̯s] 'ten'. This has led to the use of meia (meaning meia dúzia, 'half a dozen') for seis [sei̯s] 'six' when making enumerations, to avoid any confusion with três [tɾei̯s] 'three' on the telephone. In Lisbon and surrounding areas, stressed /e/ is pronounced [ɐ] or [ɐj] when it comes before an alveolo-palatal /ʎ/, /ɲ/, [ɕ], [ʑ] or palato-alveolar /ʃ/, /ʒ/ consonants followed by another vowel.
The orthography of Portuguese, which is partly etymological and analogical, does not indicate these sound changes. This makes the written language look deceptively similar to Spanish. For example, although breve ('brief') is spelled the same in both languages, it is pronounced [ˈbɾe̞βe̞] in Spanish, but [ˈbɾɛvi ~ ˈbɾɛv(ɨ)] in Portuguese. In Brazilian Portuguese, in the vast majority of cases, the only difference between final -e and -i is the stress, as both are pronounced as /i/. The former is unstressed, and the latter is stressed without any diacritical mark. In European Portuguese, final -e is not pronounced or is pronounced as [ɨ], unlike i, which is consistently [i].
Some of the most characteristic sound changes undergone by the consonants from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese are shown in the table below.
*reconstructed
Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the loss of Latin initial f- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongize. Thus, Spanish hijo and hablar correspond to Portuguese filho and falar (from Latin fīlium and fābulāre, 'son' and 'to speak' respectively). Nevertheless, in a few cases Spanish has retained the Latin f-, so that Portuguese fogo corresponds to Spanish fuego (from Latin focum 'fire'); while in other cases the Latin word has yielded two different terms in Spanish, one beginning with f- and the other with h-, with slightly different nuances or altogether different meanings: Latin fastidium > Spanish hastío - fastidio, Portuguese fastio 'boredom'; Latin fibra > Spanish fibra 'fiber' - hebra 'thread', Portuguese fibra (both meanings); Latin fascis > Spanish haz 'beam' - fajo 'bundle', Portuguese feixe (both meanings).
Another typical difference concerned the result of Latin -l- and -n- in intervocalic position:
Other consonant clusters of Latin also took markedly different routes in the two languages in their archaic period:
Learned words such as pleno, ocular, no(c)turno, tremular, and so on, were not included in the examples above, since they were adapted directly from Classical Latin in later times.
The tables above represent only general trends with many exceptions, due to:
Portuguese has tended to eliminate hiatuses that were preserved in Spanish, merging similar consecutive vowels into one (often after the above-mentioned loss of intervocalic -l- and -n-). This results in many Portuguese words being one syllable shorter than their Spanish cognates:
In other cases, Portuguese reduces consecutive vowels to a diphthong, again resulting in one syllable fewer:
There are nevertheless a few words where the opposite happened, such as Spanish comprender versus Portuguese compreender, from Latin comprehendere.
Since the late Middle Ages, both languages have gone through sound shifts and mergers that set them further apart.
The most marked phonetic divergence between Spanish and Portuguese in their modern period concerned the evolution of the sibilants. In the Middle Ages, both had a rich system of seven sibilants – paired according to affrication and voicing: /s/, /ts/, /z/, /dz/, /ʃ/, /tʃ/, and /dʒ/ (the latter probably in free variation with /ʒ/, as still happens today in Ladino) – and spelled virtually the same in Spanish and Portuguese.
Before vowels; in the coda position, there are dialectal variations within each language, not discussed here. Modern Portuguese has for the most part kept the medieval spelling.
After the Renaissance, the two languages reduced their inventory of sibilants, but in different ways:
Since no distinction is made anymore between the pronunciation of ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, Spanish spelling has been reformed according to Classical Latin. In Portuguese, the spelling of these letters is based on pronunciation, which occurred after the Vulgar Latin merger of ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩ in intervocalic position and is similar to modern Italian. This leads to some orthographic disparities:
In Spanish, the plosives b, d, g are lenited, usually realized as "soft" approximants [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞] (here represented without the undertracks) after continuants. While similar pronunciations can be heard in European Portuguese, most speakers of Brazilian Portuguese pronounce these phonemes consistently as "hard" plosives [b, d, ɡ]. This can make a Portuguese phrase such as uma bala ("a bullet") sound like una pala ("a shovel") to a Spanish-speaker.
In Spanish, the following word-final consonants are possible: -l, -r, -n, -d, -z, -j, -s, -x, but other final consonants are also allowed in loanwords.
In Portuguese, the following word-final consonants are possible: l, -r, -s, -x; -z (only after a stressed vowel); -n (only after an unstressed vowel). The final -m is an orthographic sign of a nasal sound. Other consonants typically receive a paragogic -e in loanwords.