the Portuguese language occupies 7th place in the ranking of the most spoken languages (after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Bengali). With over 234 million speakers around the world, it is the official language of many countries. As in Portugal, Brazil, Angola as well as Mozambique, and even Guinea-Bissau, where it is considered a mother tongue. The history of the Portuguese is inseparable from the one of the people who, from the 15th century, experienced an exceptional maritime saga and in a few decades spread to the four corners of the world.
Qualified as the language of poetry and music, Portuguese derives its origin from vulgar Latin, then in use in a territory called Lusitania by the Romans. This region corresponds approximately to present-day Portugal, plus part of Leon, Castile, and Extremadura, up to the vicinity of Toledo. Rome secured the domination of Lusitania in the 2nd century BC and the Roman colonization was set up with its soldiers and its cohort of officials and traders. The Roman administration and legislation prevailed, but also Latin which, by virtue of its flexibility and richness, rapidly spread to all layers of the population, quickly causing most of the primitive dialects to disappear.
The Latin, spoken in this province, especially after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, gradually acquires its own concept, which differentiates it from the language of its Leonese and Castilian neighbors. Towards the end of the 10th century, the first influences of French, langue d'oil and langue d'oc, were felt in the common religious vocabulary and in the language of the seigniorial. Galician-Portuguese gradually acquired such refinement and enjoyed such prestige that it was considered throughout the peninsula as the language of poetry par excellence. In the 15th century, we can say that Portugal had its national language, this time separated from Galician.
At that time, the great discoveries initiated a process of territorial expansion that would rapidly and considerably increase the Portuguese-speaking linguistic area: Portuguese spread throughout the world, thus experiencing the greatest expansion ever reached by a language. Portuguese is thus enriched by the contribution of indigenous languages (Bantu, Tupi, and Asian languages). Secondly, Portuguese, with its strong borrowings, would enrich other European languages with these exotic terms (guinea pig, piranha, jaguar).
Since the 18th century, Spanish no longer played the role of the second cultural language, relayed in this by French: many Gallicisms were introduced into the Portuguese language, both in vocabulary and syntax. This French influence will remain very marked in Portuguese. Portuguese left indelible traces of its passage not only on the immense territories in which it is spoken today but also on the lands where it played, at one time, the role of lingua franca. These traces are testimonies of an international primacy of Portuguese which lasted until the middle of the 19th century. Today, Portuguese language with its three main variants, European, Brazilian and African, is still one of the key languages in the world and in the EU, along with English, French, Spanish, and German.
