Portuguese is a language spoken today by around 170 million people, mainly living in Brazil and Portugal, but also in small numbers by peoples living in formre Portuguese colonies like Angola, Mozambique and others.

Portuguese is one of the romance languages, derived from the Roman arrival on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC.

Between 409 A.D. and 711, as the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic peoples, who adopted late Roman culture and the Vulgar Latin dialects of the peninsula. After the Moorish invasion of 711, Arabic became the administrative language in the conquered regions, but most of the population continued to speak a form of Romance commonly known as Mozarabic. The influence exerted by Arabic on the Romance dialects spoken in the Christian kingdoms of the north was small, affecting mainly their lexicon.

The earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language are administrative documents of the 9th century, still interspersed with many Latin phrases. Today this phase is known as Proto-Portuguese. Portugal was formally recognized as an independent nation by the Kingdom of Leon in 1143, and from the 12th to the 14th century the Portuguese language gradually came into general use.

The Portuguese spoken today is derived from those dialects spoken in Lisbon and Coimbra. A major characteristic of Portuguese lnaguage is the nasalization of certain vowel sounds and dipthongs.