Portuguese

When Portuguese split from Galician

Galician and Portuguese began to diverge from their common base around the 11th century, and by about 1250 Portuguese texts wrote lh and nh where Latin had ll and nn. A royal decree of the late 13th century made Portuguese, in place of Latin, the required language of the royal chancery. Which document is the oldest in Portuguese is argued over: the philologist Ana Maria Martins proposes the Notícia de Fiadores of 1175, while the will of Afonso II of 1214 is widely accepted as one of the earliest written entirely in the language. Galician is still its closest relative.

The first grammar, by Fernão de Oliveira, appeared in 1536, and linguists generally date Modern Portuguese from Camões's Os Lusíadas of 1572.

How Portuguese reached four continents

Expansion began with the capture of Ceuta in 1415. Portuguese ships reached Cape Verde in 1444, Angola in 1483 and São Tomé and Príncipe in 1485, and Vasco da Gama reached Mozambique in 1498. In Asia bases followed at Goa in 1510 and Macau in 1557, and in Timor. Brazil was claimed on 22 April 1500, but Portuguese became its majority language only slowly; a decree of 1757 banned the indigenous lingua francas and made Portuguese the sole language of administration and schooling.

Macau passed to Chinese administration in 1999, and East Timor, annexed by Indonesia in 1975, became independent in 2002. The Portuguese-speaking states founded the Community of Portuguese Language Countries on 17 July 1996. Equatorial Guinea applied to join in 2010, made Portuguese official in 2011 and was admitted in July 2014.

Why there are two written standards

European and Brazilian Portuguese are the two standard varieties, each with many regional accents. The African and Asian varieties mostly follow the European written standard, though their speech differs in sounds and words, sometimes in syntax too. Spelling reforms have tried to unify the written language across every country that uses it. In the 16th and 17th centuries writers imitated Latin and Greek with spellings such as pharmacia and theatro.