What Language Do They Speak in Brazil?

What language is spoken in Brazil officially?

Portuguese, and only Portuguese. Article 13 of Brazil's constitution puts it in one line: a língua portuguesa é o idioma oficial da República Federativa do Brasil. Nothing else holds official status at the national level, though a few languages do in individual towns (more on those further down).

The scale is worth pausing on. Brazil's population was 203,080,756 at the 2022 IBGE census, and Portuguese has roughly 267 million speakers worldwide, about 250 million of them native. So more than eight in every ten native Portuguese speakers on the planet are Brazilian. If you start learning Portuguese today, the accent you will hear most is almost certainly Brazilian, purely on numbers.

Nine countries have Portuguese as an official language, and exactly one of them is in the Americas:

That one row explains why people keep asking. Brazil borders ten countries, all of South America except Chile and Ecuador, and seven of those neighbors speak Spanish. Brazil is a Portuguese-speaking country surrounded by Spanish.

Do they speak Spanish in Brazil?

No. Spanish is a foreign language in Brazil, the way French is in England. You will find Spanish speakers in border towns, in tourist jobs and among immigrants, but a Brazilian walking down a street in Recife is speaking Portuguese.

The reason goes back to a treaty signed before either country existed in its modern form. On 7 June 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawing an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands and splitting the not-yet-mapped world between them. Everything east of that line was Portugal's. When Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the Brazilian coast in 1500, the land fell on the Portuguese side, and Portugal colonized it for the next three centuries. Spain took the rest of the continent. One line on a map, two languages.

Spanish does show up in Brazilian classrooms, and its status has swung back and forth. A 2005 law (Lei 11.161) required high schools to offer Spanish. That law was revoked by the education reform of Lei 13.415 in February 2017, which made English the one required foreign language and left Spanish as an optional extra. So plenty of Brazilians have studied some Spanish, but very few grew up speaking it.

Along the borders with Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina you will hear portunhol, a fluid mix of Portuguese and Spanish that locals switch into without thinking. It is a real contact variety, not a joke, though nobody would call it Brazil's language.

Can Brazilians and Spanish speakers understand each other?

Partly, and the traffic runs mostly one way. A classic 1989 study by John Jensen in the journal Hispania tested college students in both directions and found the two languages mutually intelligible at roughly a 50 to 60 percent level, with Portuguese speakers understanding Spanish better than Spanish speakers understood Portuguese.

The reason is sound, not vocabulary. On paper the two languages look like siblings. Spoken, Portuguese is the harder one to decode: it carries nasal vowels that Spanish simply does not have, it reduces unstressed vowels until they nearly vanish, and it runs words together instead of separating them cleanly. A Brazilian listening to Spanish hears a simpler vowel system than their own. A Spanish speaker listening to Portuguese hears sounds with no home in their ear.

And a warning for anyone crossing over from Spanish: the words that look identical are sometimes the ones that bite. There are more false friends between Portuguese and Spanish than the family resemblance suggests.

Call a Brazilian's cooking esquisita and you have not paid a compliment.

So are they the same language or not?

Same language, two standards. Think British and American English, but with a wider gap in pronunciation. A Brazilian and a Lisboan can hold a conversation without switching languages, and both would say they speak português. Written down, the difference is small enough that the 1990 Orthographic Agreement, which Brazil adopted on 1 January 2009 and Portugal on 1 January 2012, only touched about 0.5 percent of Brazilian spellings and 1.6 percent of European ones.

Spoken, the gap is louder. Brazilian Portuguese pronounces its vowels fully and musically, which is exactly why beginners find it easier to hear. European Portuguese swallows unstressed vowels, so telefone comes out closer to "tlfon." Most learners who start with Brazilian audio and later visit Lisbon need a week or two to adjust their ears.

One trap worth knowing: banheiro means bathroom in Brazil, but in Portugal it means lifeguard. Ask for the banheiro at a Lisbon café and you may get a confused look.

If you want to hear the difference for yourself, the greetings are the fastest test. Our guide to saying hello in Portuguese uses the Brazilian pronunciation throughout, and the same goes for thank you in Portuguese.

What other languages are spoken in Brazil?

Portuguese dominates, but it is not alone. Brazil has hundreds of Indigenous languages, pockets of German, Italian and Japanese heritage, and a legally recognized sign language.

Indigenous languages

Count them and you get different answers depending on who is counting, so treat any single number with care. The 2022 IBGE census recorded 391 Indigenous ethnic groups reporting 295 languages, up from 274 in 2010, though IBGE notes that methodology changes account for part of the rise and the count reflects self-declared names. Linguists working from language-family analysis give lower figures: the Instituto Socioambiental says "more than 160 languages and dialects" are spoken today, and reference works such as Ethnologue land near 217. Call it somewhere between 160 and 300, and note that before 1500 the number was likely closer to a thousand.

The census counted 474,856 people aged two or older speaking an Indigenous language at home, out of 1,694,836 Indigenous Brazilians. The largest by speaker count:

Some of these have real legal standing. In December 2002, São Gabriel da Cachoeira in Amazonas became the first Brazilian municipality to make Indigenous languages co-official, granting that status to Nheengatu, Tukano and Baniwa alongside Portuguese.

Immigrant languages

Southern Brazil still speaks the languages its settlers brought. Hunsrik, a German variety descended from the Hunsrückisch dialect, is co-official in three municipalities: Antônio Carlos and São João do Oeste in Santa Catarina, and Santa Maria do Herval in Rio Grande do Sul. Talian, rooted in the Venetian dialects that Italian immigrants carried over from 1875, was recognized as a Brazilian Cultural Reference by IPHAN on 10 November 2014, the first immigration language in Brazil to earn that status.

Brazil is also home to the largest Japanese-descended population outside Japan, around 2 million people according to Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The language itself has faded across generations, though: most third-generation Japanese Brazilians grew up speaking Portuguese at home.

Libras, the Brazilian sign language

Libras (Língua Brasileira de Sinais) is Brazil's sign language, with its own grammar rather than a signed copy of Portuguese. Law 10.436 of 24 April 2002 recognized it as a legal means of communication and expression for Brazil's deaf communities, and Decree 5.626 of 2005 set out how public services and teacher training must support it. Worth stating precisely: that law gave Libras legal recognition, it did not make it a second official language of Brazil.

10 Brazilian Portuguese phrases to take with you

Here is the part you can actually use. These are the phrases that get you through a first day in Brazil, with Brazilian pronunciation written the way it sounds to an English ear. Stressed syllables are in capitals.

Notice the gender rule in row five. Obrigado / obrigada matches the person speaking, not the person being thanked, so a woman says obrigada even to a man. It catches out nearly every beginner.

Four sounds that unlock Brazilian pronunciation

Read those phrases again and four patterns show up over and over. Learn these and your accent jumps immediately:

1. Di and ti turn soft. In most of Brazil, di sounds like "jee" and ti like "chee." That is why dia is "JEE-ah" and noite is "NOY-chee."
2. A final L becomes a W. Legal (cool, great) is "leh-GOW," not "leh-GAL."
3. A final R softens toward H. Favor comes out closer to "fah-VOH" than "fah-VOR."
4. Unstressed final vowels shrink. Final o drifts toward "oo" and final e toward "ee," which is how obrigado becomes "oh-bree-GAH-doo."

Those four cover most of what trips up beginners. The Portuguese alphabet chart does the same job for every letter, digraph and accent mark.

Practice idea: say all ten phrases out loud twice, then order a coffee in your head using Um café, por favor. That is a real sentence, and you built it on your first day. Ready for more? Start with the most common Portuguese words, then work through the rest of our Brazilian Portuguese lessons.