Galician and Portuguese are very similar in phonology sound , morphology spelling , lexicon dictionary and syntax sentence structure. In fact, speakers of Galician and European Portuguese can still understand each other perfectly! Portuguese also has a lot of Arabic influence, due to the Moor occupancy of the Iberian Peninsula up until the 13 th century. Some examples are: almofada cushion , azeitona olive and garrafa bottle.
Similar to the accent differences between American and British English, Portuguese has also developed differently on each side of the pond. Phoneticians describe the latter accent as being softer, perhaps because people from Portugal speak with their mouths a little more closed.
It is the word you would use when speaking to an elder or stranger, perhaps even your boss. Also, Brazilians have a tendency to use terms from 18th- and 19th-century Portuguese. Regardless, we tend to consider Brazilian Portuguese to be more informal and modern. If you speak Russian, you may have had the experience of overhearing Portuguese speakers in the street and confusing their language with Russian.
If so, you are not alone, as this type of confusion is common for many Russians and speakers of other Slavic languages. In a series of swift, lightning-fast conquests, the Umayyads took almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, and replaced Gothic with Arabic as the language of the elite. However, the Vulgar Latin dialects continued to survive in large part because most of the population remained Christian despite now being subject to heavy Arabic influence.
For this reason, the Vulgar Latin of this time is known as Mozarabic. As had been the case under the Visigoth kings, Mozarabic was spoken by a large majority of the population, while Arabic was only used by the upper echelons of society. Whence Portuguese and Spanish, then? At last, with the Muslim conquest of Spain, they were beginning to appear. In the northwest corner of Spain, the tiny kingdom of Asturias successfully resisted the Moors, and was able to recover and grow in strength throughout the 9 th and 10 th centuries CE.
This one remaining Christian bulwark on the peninsula thus served as the nucleus of the movement known as the Reconquista or the Christian reconquering of Spain, and also as the nucleus from which Portuguese and Spanish as we know them today were eventually born. At its inception, Asturias was composed of the modern-day regions of Asturias and Galicia, which were never fully under the control of the Moors. Indeed, Galicia especially had remained fiercely distinctive since the 4 th century.
In CE, slightly earlier than the rest of the peninsula, it had become a separate Roman vassal state under the Suebi, a separate Germanic race from the Visigoths, and remained an independent Suebi kingdom until CE, when Visigoth King Leovigild absorbed it into the rest of Visigoth Hispania.
Galician dialects of Vulgar Latin were thus already rather more divergent compared to Vulgar Latin and Mozarabic dialects on the rest of the peninsula, and even compared to their Asturian brethren. Enter a Galician nobleman named Vimara Peres, who at the end of the 9 th century CE, led an Asturian force to conquer a sizeable chunk of Andalusian territory between the Minho and Douro rivers.
He also named it after the largest port city in the region, Portus Cale —taken today as the origin of the name Portugal. From this point on, Portugal began to develop its own regional identity, and indeed, its own distinct Vulgar Latin dialects, separate from the Asturian ones.
Eventually, Asturias splintered into several successor states as various kings and heirs fought for control over the area. Two of these successor states were the Kingdom of Leon, and the County of Portugal, the latter of which declared its independence as a separate Kingdom from Leon in under King Afonso Henrique, and by which time had expanded to fill out most of the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Meanwhile, Leon, later the Kingdom of Leon and Castile, gradually began to assert itself as the dominant force in the central area of the Peninsula.
It eventually defeated the Moorish kingdoms, and expanded to control the territory of modern-day Spain by the end of the 15 th century CE. The Vulgar Latin daughter dialect that eventually became the language that we know today as Spanish was the Castilian dialect that originated with Leon and Castile, and which became standardised in written form in the 13 th century around the city of Toledo through the work of the Toledo School of Translators. Today, both Standard Castilian Spanish and Standard Continental Portuguese reflect this rich tapestry of linguistic and cultural history, with a sizeable number of loanwords from Arabic, Gothic and in the case of Spanish Basque.
Both languages retain similar grammatical features and syntax, and also share many cognates, or root word forms, as a result of their common descent from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the peninsula.
However, Portuguese and Spanish differ mainly because of their different origins during the period following the Muslim conquest of Iberia and the advent of the Reconquista. Modern-day Portugal was conquered and consolidated as a stable kingdom much earlier than Spain, and thus the process of the standardisation of Portuguese began earlier than that of Spanish, resulting in Portuguese retaining more recognisable features of Vulgar Latin than Spanish, whose original core dialects evolved and became standardised much later.
Geography, both natural and political, has also played a part—had Portugal not remained an independent kingdom and state, it is conceivable that Portuguese might have deteriorated, much as the other Vulgar Latin dialects have today. The reverse with Castilian Spanish is possible too, though much more unlikely, due to the relative size of the two polities. What happened to those, I hear you ask?
After all, there were other successor states to Asturias, like Aragon, and Navarre. Surely they had their own unique dialects. And what happened to Leonese and Galician? The answer is that with the process of standardisation, other dialects that have not been chosen as the standard often become marginalised and are left to simply fade away.
In many cases, this is exactly what happened with the other dialects up until recent times: Aragonese, Leonese, and Navarrese are all still spoken, but by relatively few people, as Castilian Spanish became the sole language of use in almost all domains of public life after the 15 th century.
Nonetheless, Galicia has managed to maintain its strong distinctive regional identity, and Galician has survived quite well into the present day as a strong marker of that identity.
Two other languages that have experienced a resurgence on the peninsula are Catalan, which after almost near-extinction has reemerged as one of the primary drivers of the Catalan independence movement, and Basque, very probably the last survivor of the languages originally spoken on the peninsula before the coming of the Romans. In the 14 th and 15 th centuries, Portuguese and Spanish explorers were an integral part of the European Age of Exploration, which saw the colonisation and domination of Africa, the Americas, and much of Asia by European colonists.
Portuguese and Spanish came to override indigenous languages in much the same way Latin did, and with almost identical end results: Spanish is now the dominant language in most of Central and South America at the expense of many native languages, while Brazilian Portuguese has far outstripped Continental Portuguese in terms of number of speakers and influence.
Both languages have also left their mark on daughter languages as far flung as Tagalog in the Philippines, Kristang in Malaysia, and Guinean Creole in Guinea-Bissau.
With the collapse of the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, all these varieties and offshoots of Portuguese and Spanish have been largely left to develop on their own, much as the various dialects of Vulgar Latin were left to their own devices after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Chilean Spanish is full of loans from Quechua, while informal Angolan Portuguese is filled with loans from Kimbundu. It seems possible that both languages might go the way of their once dominant Roman parent.
Already we sometimes speak not of Portuguese and Spanish, but Portugueses and Spanishes; in a hundred years, perhaps we might even speak of an Iberian language family. As the Spanish saying goes, no hay dos sin tres —never two without three. Thank you for this fantastic article. I am of Portuguese descent and found this to be a fascinating read. I am of Spanish descent and found your article quite interesting esp. This language pair is the closest to each other in vocabulary, grammar and structure than to any of the other ones.
The reality is that Italian and Spanish are actually not that alike at all. Their grammar, vocabulary and structure diverge quite more than people think. Conversely, educated Portuguese and Spanish speakers can converse effortlessly with one another each in his own language. I know this is over a year old, but I found this article and saw this comment and had to chime in. What I have seen is that Portuguese speakers have a much easier time understanding Spanish speakers than the other way around.
On the other hand, you are right when you say that it is easier for Portuguese. Generalisations have their limitations. I am Portuguese and live abroad for any years. In my opinion, the ability to read the other language may be roughly similar between Portuguese and Spanish but clearly this is not the case with the spoken version.
The latter seems to be mostly dependent on the amount of exposure. So in my experience Spanish are generally more inward looking and tend to be less exposed to foreign languages. As a result, they can often struggle with Portuguese.
Catalan has a closer sound system to Portuguese than Spanish Castillan but I am not sure this helps too much to understand the language. Perhaps this would be an interesting angle to explore the reasons why there are limits to understanding.
Personally I was exposed to some Spanish when young yet I could also understand some Catalan when over in the Catalonia. I find Spanish harder and more similar to French. I thought that they sound more similar to each other then either of them to Spanish.
They seem to slur their sentences much more then us spanish speakers. Your article is a good first approach to the subject — congratulations on helping bring it to wider audiences. However, as a galician myself I need to be picky of a couple of aspects:. Check the sources. There are about 40 period references be it map, manuscript or stone inscription which identify either kings or kingdom. Of these, just one talks about a «king of Asturias». Five speak about the «king of Galicia and Asturias» in that order.
The rest, thirty-something, speak about the «Kings of Galicia». The Kingdom of Asturias was a fabrication of spanish national historiography to, essentially, make up spanish continuity since the Visigoths and, before them, the Roman Empire , in their myth that spain was a unity across history. In actuality, Asturias was part of Gallaecia Galicia in period sources. The sections of the Iberian Peninsula which were not under control of the muslim kingdoms were called «Galicia», and so is referenced in the muslim chronicles themselves.
They often call the territory they control not only Al Andalus, but «Hispania», and the lands where the christians dwell are «Al Jalikia» — Galicia. For all we know, it seems completely made up. There is no coat of arms or standard. Even the Vikings speak of «Jakobsland» — the land of Saint James. But, as you correctly depicted, Galicia was a pain in the ass for the Romans, then the visigoths, and afterwards the muslims.
In trying to legitimate its right to rule over its much older, more stablished sibling kingdoms Leon had one of the most successful capitals of the old Kingdom of Gallaecia, and the lesser Galicia had Santiago, the christian capital of the West , Castile began making up a history of being ancient and descendant of a long tradition of kings, rooting back to the visigoths. They needed, however, a missing link between the visigoths and the recent Kingdom of Castile.
What had happened during the muslim invasion, and in the centuries that followed? They could have told the truth — that Galicia resisted and expanded. Even at the XIV and XV centuries, they were still revolting themselves against the Castilian kings and wanting to set up their own government, supported by Portugal and Britain.
Galician noblemen and cities routinely hailed portuguese or english kings as their own, rather than castilian ones. This seems to have been so since the X century, judging from period sources. King Alfonso X is famous for several things. One of them, indeed, is making castillian the official language for courts and law. The other is for writting the «Cantigas de Santa Maria», the most famous piece of Iberian medieval poetry and music… in galician language. Galician was the language of high culture at the time in Iberian christian courts.
However, that minstrels and poets of all kind wrote in Galician is well attested by the remaining poetry which lived until today, and it was considered so normal that both kings and lay people did so. Now, having said the above things, I should clarify that they are clarifications — in general, your article does show a refreshingly modern and renewed take on Iberian history and on the history of its languages.
Other writers would have completely ignored any other narratives than the main spanish and portuguese ones, so thank you for keeping a more open mind on the matter.
Your comment was as valuable as the article itself. Thanks both to you and the original author. Great stuff! Thank you for this interesting expose. I am a composer, musician, singer-songwriter, writer and from my travels in Spain, Portugal, France and through my work with European musicians also, I became very interested in the history, genesis and current obvious differences in spoken Portuguese and Spanish.
Enlightening and good that you put up online. Thanks again Kevin Martens Wong. Very interesting! I wish you had added Ladino to the mix — would be interested to know how, when, where it evolved and persisted especially after the reconquista and inquisition. King Alfonso was the grandson of the King of Leon.
His mother was the princess. The rock that was Portugal at the time, was her dowry. Her husband was named Duke of Portugal and their son declared independence and became King. This was in Northern border was Galicia. He then started to conquer lands to the south and 5 generations later we have what is now Portugal borders.
So as a spanish speaker, it is much, much easier to understand portuguese from a written standpoint than from a verbal one. While in the case of the portuguese speaker, I understand it is much easier for them to understand spanish from both a verbal and written form due to the open-direct pronuniciation of spanish.
But I have never seen a Spanish and Italian speaker have an intelligible conversation about anything beyond just the basic conversation stuff. In fact, I have been to many Spanish speaking tourist destinations over the years and have in fact I have seen It alien tourists struggle to communicate with the local hotel Spanish speakers. Conversely, I have see very communication between Portuguese tourists and the Spanish speaking hotel employees.
They never looked confused. The thing is that our vocabularies and grammars are so similar, that when an unfamiliar word comes up, we can easily understand the meaning of the unfamiliar word just from the context alone. Sometimes a Portuguese speaker will use a certain word, and a Spanish speaker will use another word, but both words mean the same thing, and thus they both understand what is meant.
The other thing that greatly facilitates comprehension between Portuguese and Spanish speakers is the fact that the structures word order of both languages are almost identical. Italian is a horse of a different colour.
But before knowing the reason why Portuguese sounds the way it sounds, we must know the process that shaped the French pronunciation. French is a Romance language that descends from Gallo-Roman, an ancient Romance language, spoken by the Gauls and more specifically by the Belgians. Ancient Gaul now France was always a multilingual place.
It is estimated that at the time of the French Revolution, three quarters of the French population spoke a language other than French. The alteration of its pronunciation could be due to the Celts and Germans. It is for this reason that much of the French vocabulary is of Celtic origin, specifically from the French.
The following table shows some words that the French language took from the Gaulish. Gaul from the third century was co-populated by the Franks, and the first Christian king of the Franks emerged. His domain was called Francia and currently retains the same name; At that time that territory covered the north of present-day France, present-day Holland and much of Germany.
In Francia, the nobility was bilingual, they spoke Frankish and Gallo-Roman. The Franks spoke Frankish, a Germanic language, while a part of the peasant population spoke Gallo-Roman, a Romance language, which several centuries later became old French. The Germanic language continued to be spoken among kings and nobility until the 10th century, after which it was replaced by ancient French.
As a result of more than years of German-Latin bilingualism, many Germanic words were incorporated into the Gallo-Romanic language when it was transformed into ancient French in AD. And after the Franks stopped from speaking Frankish, the old French they spoke tended to have a strong Frankish influence, with a distinctive Frankish accent, which introduced new phonemes, the stress-timing, Germanic grammar and syntactical elements, and contained many more Germanic loans that were not found in ancient French spoken by native Gallo-Romans.
Although the Gallo-Roman population far exceeded the Franks, the position of the Franks as leaders and landowners lent their version of ancient French a greater power of influence over that of the Gallo-Romans; therefore, it became the basis of later versions of the French language, including modern French.
French also borrowed words from Old Norse, Gothic languages such as Burgundian and other words were borrowed from modern and ancient Dutch and German.
Breton is another language that possibly influenced French pronunciation.
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