Advanced word formation, neologisms & slang morphology

What it is

Brazilian Portuguese coins words at speed. A brand becomes a process (uberização), a weekday becomes a verb (sextou!), an English command gets an -ar ending (printar), a protest gets a suffix (panelaço). Underneath sits an older layer of words from Tupi and from the African languages brought by enslaved people, now so ordinary that most Brazilians never think about where caçula or abacaxi came from. At C2 you should decode all of this on the fly, build the plurals correctly and know which coinages belong in a chat and which in a report.

How Brazilians build words

Compounds and their plurals

The plural depends on what each part is: a verb never takes a plural, a noun or an adjective does.

Note the double life of guarda: in guarda-chuva it is the verb guardar (no plural: guarda-chuvas); in guarda-noturno it is a noun, the guard (guardas-noturnos).

Clippings and abbreviations

Speech shortens long words: facul (faculdade), refri (refrigerante), niver (aniversário), cel (celular), Sampa (São Paulo), Floripa (Florianópolis). Messages go further: vc (você), tb (também), pq (porque), blz (beleza), vlw (valeu), tmj (tamo junto), sdds (saudades), kkk or rs for laughter.

Blends and meme verbs

Blends fuse two words: portunhol (português + espanhol), aborrecente (aborrecer + adolescente), namorido (namorado + marido), chafé (chá + café: weak coffee). Internet culture turns nouns into verbs, usually seen in the third-person preterite: sextou (it's Friday!), lacrou (nailed it), mitou (legendary move), flopou (it flopped).

English verbs

Brazilian Portuguese adapts English verbs as regular -ar verbs: deletar, printar, postar, linkar, checar, resetar, escanear. A few take -ear and conjugate like passear: stalkear → eu stalkeio, ela stalkeia.

Productive suffixes

The older layers: Tupi and African words

• Tupi gave Brazil names for its plants, animals and places: abacaxi, mandioca, caju, pipoca, capivara, jacaré, tatu, xará (namesake). Place names keep Tupi pieces: -açu / -guaçu "big" (Iguaçu, "big water"), -mirim "small" (Mogi-Mirim beside Mogi-Guaçu), ita "stone" (Itaquera, Itaboraí).
• Bantu languages such as Kimbundu gave words of home and affection: caçula (youngest child), cafuné (stroking someone's hair), dengo (tenderness), moleque (kid), quitanda (small grocery), cochilar (to doze), moqueca, quilombo.
• Yoruba gave religious and culinary words from Afro-Brazilian traditions: axé, orixá, acarajé.
• Abacaxi also became slang for a tricky problem: Esse projeto é um abacaxi.

When to use it

• Chat, social media, conversation: meme verbs, clippings and anglicisms are normal and expected.
• Journalism and essays: process nouns in -ização and protest words in -aço are standard: a pejotização do mercado de trabalho.
• Formal and corporate writing: prefer native terms: excluir rather than deletar, captura de tela rather than print, conversar rather than teclar.
• Affectionate place names: Sampa and Floripa in a song or a chat, never in an official letter.

Contrasts and traps

• guardas-chuvas is wrong: the verb part never pluralises.
• Both parts change in noun + noun compounds: couves-flores, cachorros-quentes.
• -ear verbs need the i: stalkeio, not stalkio.
• Slang dates fast: a meme verb that was everywhere five years ago may now sound like your uncle.
• Clippings are informal: a facul in a CV is a slip.

If you speak Spanish

The machinery is shared (paraguas, cacerolazo, portuñol), the output is not. Spanish adapts English verbs in -ear (postear, chequear, linkear, resetear); Brazilian Portuguese uses -ar (postar, checar, linkar, resetar). Beware chatear: in Portuguese it means "to annoy" (from chato); chatting online is conversar or bater papo. Compounds that are invariable in Spanish (los paraguas, los rascacielos) take a plural in Portuguese (guarda-chuvas, arranha-céus). And your -azo is their -aço: cacerolazo = panelaço, golazo = golaço.