Portuguese Language - Classification and Related Languages

Classification and Related Languages

Portuguese belongs to the West Iberian branch of the Romance languages, and it has special ties with the following members of this group:

• Galician, Fala and portunhol da pampa (the way riverense and its sibling dialects are referred to in Portuguese), its closest relatives.
• Mirandese, Leonese, Asturian, Extremaduran and Cantabrian (Astur-Leonese languages). Mirandese is the only recognised regional language spoken in Portugal (beside Portuguese, the only official language in Portugal).
• Spanish and calão (the way caló, language of the Iberian Romani, is referred to in Portuguese).

Despite the obvious lexical and grammatical similarities between Portuguese and other Romance languages, it is not mutually intelligible with them. Apart from other Galician-Portuguese descendants, Mirandese and Spanish, Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary before attaining a reasonable level of comprehension in the other Romance languages, and vice versa.

Portuguese has a larger phonemic inventory than Spanish, and its dialect-varying system of allophony furthers distance even more. That could explain why it is generally not very intelligible to Spanish speakers despite the strong lexical similarity between the two languages; Portuguese speakers have a greater intelligibility of Spanish than do the reverse. Communication is better between monolingual Brazilians and Spanish-speaking Latin Americans than it is between monolingual Portuguese and Spanish-speaking Spaniards, and portunhol, a form of code-switching, has far more users in South America.