If you want to learn Portuguese, you will perhaps be asked a question: Portugal’s Portuguese or Brazilian Portuguese? The two are quite similar enough to be mutually intelligible, certainly. But for native people, the awareness of variances is acute.
Let us see some of the major differences between European (Portugal) and Brazilian Portuguese. Overall, the majority unites the two dialects than divides them but having awareness of the ways the two diverge is useful when one is learning the language.
The differences
Accents
Few people find Brazilian Portuguese to be phonetically soothing to the ear having its open vowels, but think that European Portuguese sounds a little bit mumbled and doughy. Brazilian accents have a lyrical and strong cadence to foreign ears, making Brazilian Portuguese initially simpler to learn and understand. Because of the differences in pronunciation, it may take a bit more time to get accustomed to the accent on the other side of the Atlantic.
Grammar, Spelling
Certain words are spelled differently. For example, “reception” in European Portuguese is receção, while Brazilian Portuguese lends an audible p to the spelling of recepção. This is suitable for words where the letter p is audible in Brazilian Portuguese while silent in European Portuguese.
Brazilians are quite creative with their use of Portuguese, changing some nouns into verbs. To congratulate needs the Portuguese phrase dar os parabéns, whereas, Brazilians at times also condense this expression into one verb: parabenizar.
One more interesting thing is the assimilation of foreign words into Brazilian Portuguese written using a phonetic twist. “Media” (as in mass media) is mídia in Brazilian Portuguese and media in European Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese borrows the word from American English and overlooks its Latin roots. European Portuguese borrows it from Latin and keeps the original spelling. Normally, speaking, European Portuguese is majorly resistant to alter and precious with regards to assimilating foreign words.
Formal, Informal Speech
Portuguese is one language that has several pronouns depending on the formality of the situation. In Brazil, one can address the majority of people using você in informal contexts, but it works in certain formal situations as well, bringing it a bit closer to the classless universality of you in the English language. In Portugal, however, tu is said exclusively for friends and family, as well as in other casual scenarios.
Formal and informal speech could be quite confusing for a Brazilian immigrant in Portugal. If you confuse tu with você in European Portuguese, you will be unsuccessful to get in people’s good graces and will appear off as impolite, rude and aggressive. It is even more confusing when one understands that the Portuguese never utter você explicitly — it feels crude — so they obliterate the pronoun and conjugate the verb utilizing the third person singular.
Vocabulary
The biggest difference between the two Portuguese is the vocabulary. Several words are totally different in both languages. Here are some:
English
Bus Autocarro Ônibus
Brown Castanho Marrom
Suit Fato Terno
These are some of the examples of differences in vocabulary.
Several of these variances are confusing to speakers from various continents, and they might sometimes lead to a communication breakdown. If you stay curious and are not afraid to ask questions, you will faster resolve any sort of misunderstandings. Portuguese and Brazilians still speak the same language, in spite of slightly different evolutions over the decades because of cultural and historical differences.
Which form of Portuguese you should learn
The wise idea would be to consider where you would be visiting, working or studying. If you are attracted to statistics, then in Portugal around 10 million people speak this language while in Brazil it is 200 million. Just keep in mind when people from these two countries communicate they have to use very little effort. Thus, the culture of respective countries. hardly gets into the way.