ATTENTION: Brazilians do not speak Spanish. And most of us do take
offense at this confusion, however
innocent it may be.
Brazilian Portuguese is a variation of
Portuguese used in (duh!)
Brazil. Although the
language derived from Portuguese of
Portugal, it is now different enough to impair
communications between
Brazilians and Portuguese
people.
It's not as similar as UK and US English:
One has to speak very slowly to be understood by the other. Some times it's even
impossible to understand due to different use of words and
slang. To prove it, you just have to ask the huge number of
jokes Brazilians make using what the Portuguese consider "normal" words - but mean quite
obscene things in the Brazilian version. The opposite is, of course, true.
Maybe the the most marked difference between the languages is the Brazilian’s craze for verbs in
gerund and Portugal’s hatred of such abuse.
As if classical Portuguese was not complex enough, Brazilian Portuguese is not spoken nor written in the same fashion in all parts of
my big country. All regions have their own accent, slang and influence. For instance, the
northen folk have a lot of native indian influence and that is very clear in their
speech. We
cariocas have the
magic power to make most
consonants sound like 'schhhhhhhhhhhhhh',
hissing a little bit.
Brazil was the biggest Portuguese
colony until the
19th century and our major influences came from Portugal. But we also had invasions (and consequent mixing of blood and cultures) from the
French, the
Dutch, and loads of immigrants from
Japan,
Italy,
Germany and most northern
European countries. We had thousands of indian tribes when the Portuguese arrived, but they were quickly killed by white-men's
diseases,
slavery and plain old
massacre.