An interesting topic that came up when Leticía and I went off topic during one of our Portuguese sessions was that the Portuguese language, particularly its spelling, has changed more than I would have predicted in the last 30 years. Leticía would talk about how she was taught certain spellings in elementary school, only for them to be eliminated in the future. This was a commonplace occurrence to her, but interesting for me to hear about. She said that a Nova Acordó Ortográfico came out when she was a child (in 1990), which established changes in the spelling of Portuguese that had been made. These changes were then given some time, around six years, for the population to adapt to them and have been permanent since they were established.
An example that Leticía gave was the trema, a u with two dots above it that used to be used in Portuguese. It was eliminated from Portugal Portuguese in 1945 and from Brazilian Portuguese in 1990. Some examples of spellings that were changed as a result of the trema being eliminated are freqüencia (frequency), aqüífero (aquifier), agüentar (to withstand), and pingüim (penguin). The new spellings are the same but the u no longer has a trema. I was not able to find whether it had any connection to the German umlaut, which is the German word for the two dot symbol above letters. The umlaut is still commonly used in German in current day.
Other examples are the loss of many hyphens in Brazilian Portuguese after certain prefixes, the elimination of c’s and p’s as silent consonants, making weekdays, months, and seasons lowercase, and making only the first word of titles uppercase.
A lot of these changes have been made to make Brazilian Portuguese more like Portugal Portuguese. Therefore, in internet searches and legal documents across borders the spellings of certain words in Portuguese would still be the same. The reforms in 1990 actually affected more words in Portugal Portuguese (1.5%) than in Brazilian Portuguese (0.5% of words). However, there were definitely difficulties in the transitions of legal documents, business transactions, and particularly school materials to the new spellings.
Leticía also says that many Brazilians believe that another motivation behind the accents being eliminated are to make Portuguese more similar to English, but it seems as though consistency between dialects was the true reason. Tangential to the point of Portuguese potentially becoming more like English is that in Portuguese there is also the concept of estrangismo, the overuse of foreign words instead of having original Portuguese words for things.
All of these language trends are the result of globalization bringing the world’s languages in more contact with each other and countries with commercialization hubs dominating these language flows, such as English. However, this globalization also created the importance of consistency between Portuguese dialects that originally motivated these spelling reforms. The consolidation of Portuguese spellings in the long run makes it a more powerful player in an increasingly integrated world of languages. Overall, the reforms in 1990 have now created 98% consistency between Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil.
Comments
Hi Elspeth, your post was great! Learning about Portuguese language development and spelling revisions is fascinating! It's interesting how globalization has standardized accents to improve communication. Portuguese illustrates the delicate balance between linguistic identity and adapting to a rapidly changing environment.