Introduction
Portuguese language, Portuguese Português, Romance language that is spoken in Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese colonial and formerly colonial territories. Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain, is closely related to Portuguese. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 50 million L2 speakers, Portuguese has approximately 270 million total speakers. It is usually listed as the sixth-most spoken language and the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers.
Most of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived, directly or through other Romance languages, from Latin. Nevertheless, because of its original Lusitanian and Celtic Gallaecian heritage, and the later participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery, it has a relevant number of words from the ancient Hispano-Celtic group and adopted loanwords from other languages around the world. In Portugal, the language’s country of origin, there are more than 10 million speakers. It is estimated that there are also some 8 million Portuguese speakers in Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe). Portuguese is also spoken by about 678,000 people in the United States, with large communities of speakers in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.