Portuguese language
Months ago when I started this blog ( the main goal was only helping myself in my studies and also my students), I wrote a post about the differences about Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, the differences still intriguing and sometimes I received some very " offensive comments" about some people not even a linguistic claiming I was wrong and so on.Yes this is a blog and I cite all the fonts, and people forgot that a blog is a personal page with personal opinions for me the differences of Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese are significant.I am not a linguist , I am a Portuguese teacher, who lived in Brazil most of her life and travelled the world (more 42 countries) and worked with in a diverse environment with many different cultures, and know the difference in accents, I know in loco, not only reading in books, and I have literature to prove my views.
A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions, both in spoken and in written forms. This situation usually arises when language and the national identity of its native speakers do not, or did not, coincide.
Portuguese varies mainly between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Both varieties have undergone significant and divergent developments in phonology and the grammar of their pronominal systems. Brazilian Portuguese is considerably more conservative in its phonology, but much less conservative in its grammar. The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, especially for a Brazilian attempting to understand a European. Because of the extensive and long-term influence of the Brazilian telenovelas, a Portuguese national has little problem in understanding the Brazilian accent and specific words.
Brazilian and European Portuguese currently have two distinct, albeit similar, spelling standards. A unified orthography for the two varieties (including a limited number of words with dual spelling) has been recently approved by the national legislatures of Brazil and Portugal and is now official; see Spelling reforms of Portuguese for additional details. Formal written standards remain grammatically close to each other, despite some minor syntactic differences.
African Portuguese is based on the European dialect, but has undergone its own phonetic and grammatical developments, sometimes reminiscent of spoken Brazilian.
Source :
Pluricentric languages: differing norms in different nations, By Michael G. Clyne
