Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese (Portuguese: português brasileiro, português do Brasil; pt-BR) is the variety of the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil. It is written and spoken by virtually all of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, Paraguay, Japan, Portugal, and Argentina.

Some authors compare the differences between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese to those found between British and American English, while others see the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese as greater or much greater. The differences in the spoken language are much more pronounced than the differences in the formal written language. As many as 1% of the words are different and limited mainly to flora, fauna, foods, etc. As with many languages, the differences between standard Brazilian Portuguese and its informal vernacular are marked, though lexicon and grammar rules remain the same. Nonetheless, there are still scientific debates about the status of that variant due to those differences, especially whether or not it would be a case of diglossia.

In 1990 an agreement between Brazil and the lusophone countries was established to diminish those differences, "The Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990" (Portuguese: Accordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990) is an international treaty whose purpose is to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.

Nevertheless, the comparatively recent development of Brazilian Portuguese (and its use by people of various linguistic backgrounds), the cultural prestige and strong government support accorded to the written standard has maintained the unity of the language over the whole of Brazil and ensured that all regional varieties remain fully intelligible. Starting in the 1960s, the nationwide dominance of television networks based in the southeast (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) has made the accents of that region into a common spoken standard for the means of communication, as well.