Portuguese is the official language of eight countries across the continents of Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. While Brazil and Portugal are the main references for the language, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe mark the language’s relevance in the African continent, prompting Equatorial Guinea to embrace the language as co-official since 2010, with East Timor and Macau being the home of Portuguese in Asia.
As the European language with the third highest number of native speakers, Portuguese is the fourth most spoken language in the world and can potentially connect you with over 260 million people worldwide, opening up exciting opportunities for cultural exchanges, tourism, business and for the engagement with critical questions for the future such as climate change and the role of fossil fuel in it.
Additional information:
Given the many ways in which English has borrowed from Latin and from Romance languages across the centuries, Portuguese can be surprisingly smooth to learn for English speakers. As a Romance language itself, Portuguese bears great grammatic similarities with Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan, making it especially attractive for those with any knowledge of one of these languages.
The main varieties of Portuguese taught worldwide come from Brazil and Portugal. While distinctive in terms of pronunciation, the language is the same and varieties are mutually intelligible across the many places where the language is spoken – just as different varieties of English around the world are!
At Languages for All, we offer classes with Brazilian tutors and our programme is the ony one in the UK proudly sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Leitorado initiative.
Am I eligible to study Portuguese?
Portuguese is available as an a credit-bearing module (optional or compulsory) and as part of our Free Language Course scheme.