User:Srtª PiriLimPomPom/Portuguese

Pluricentric language. It's hard to conceal my thoughts in less verbose explanations sometimes, so I need time before I make these edits (section Brazil is the only new part, and the entirely new one) that would clear things up. Sadly, I got very little time for this right now. Feel free to edit this (preferentially making a point under the text of this page) if you wish to make a point.

Portuguese
Apart from the Galician question, Portuguese varies mainly between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Both varieties have undergone significant and divergent developments in phonology and the grammar of their pronominal systems. Brazilian Portuguese is considerably much less conservative in its grammar. The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, especially for a Brazilian attempting to understand a European. Because of the extensive and long-term influence of the Brazilian telenovelas, a Portuguese national has little problem in understanding the Brazilian accent and specific words.

Brazilian and European Portuguese currently have two distinct, albeit similar, spelling standards. A unified orthography for the two varieties (including a limited number of words with dual spelling) has been approved by the national legislatures of Brazil and Portugal and is now official; see Spelling reforms of Portuguese for additional details. Formal written standards remain grammatically close to each other, despite some minor syntactic differences.

African Portuguese and Asian Portuguese are based on the standard European dialect, but have undergone its own phonetic and grammatical developments, sometimes reminiscent of spoken Brazilian.

Brazil
A further complication is the theoretical presence of a complex Brazilian diglossia. Some sociologists and linguists advocate treating the main and most common divisions for the language, low-variant and high-variant Brazilian Portuguese, both as separate languages, but for the mainstream, this is not the case, with the concept of diglossia being generally not explained to foreign language students, and often traditional education enforcing the concept of low-variant Brazilian Portuguese as an "incorrect" form of the language being formerly commonplace, though such a notion is being superseded (albeit it is still vastly seen as a very radical, controversial and potentially damaging idea to not teach high-variant Brazilian Portuguese, given its higher prestige necessary to many things in a vast variety of workplace environments – perhaps as much as formal education –, what would even further isolate people of low socioeconomic status from opportunities). Their divergence is explained as follows.

With more basilectal forms of language being heavily influenced by the most typically Brazilian innovative characteristics being traced to the mandatory learning of Portuguese through little contact with learned native speakers of it by illiterate Tupí-derived creole língua geral speakers after the banning of their language (created by the Jesuits in order to assist on the catechism of the Indigenous peoples), then by far the most widely-spoken in Brazil, by the Marquis of Pombal's anti-Jesuit policies, low-variant Brazilian Portuguese (or [base] vernacular, colloquial – linguagem coloquial/português casual – and educated – linguagem escolarizada – forms of Brazilian Portuguese, with absent – affectionately/pejoratively, [português do] "povão", intending in its own form for "of the common people" –, minimal and minimally standardized form-like alterations as influence from the learned high-variant norm, respectively, divided in geographical-based dialects, and geographical- and socioeconomic class-based accents) was never officially standardized, and doing so would require research to not cause a bias in favor of solely one region of the country – low-variant Brazilian Portuguese (especially the vernacular and/or colloquial form(s)) does not possess much sociolinguistic prestige, the reason to which one solely variant of it cannot be assumed to be preferred as a standard over the others.

An example of country that tried to meet a standardized national common language that was an in-between of various closely-related languages is the Philippines, but the Filipino language turned out to be just an artificial register of Tagalog. Such a process in Brazil, without research in order to equalize the level of influence from the dialects of its vast territorial span in a standardized form of L-variant Brazilian Portuguese, would likely favor the variants spoken in the metropolises of the [especially coastal] Southeastern area in disregard to others, much like today's standard Brazilian Portuguese is based in the dialect/accent (English senses) spoken by the middle and upper classes of originally Rio de Janeiro. The disparity in form of such, caused by an artificial compromise dialect origin of the newer one, could also theoretically happen to help foreign language students who would try to acquire fluency in both standardized forms, differing between either with relative proficiency.

With more acrolectal forms of language being heavily influenced by conservative Portuguese grammar-oriented characteristics and [often re-learned] borrowings from the European form, with a diminished degree of linguistic brasilidade (Brazilianness), high-variant Brazilian Portuguese (common given sets of language use may include, in a given interpretation, a separante [media] standard – norma padrão – from the literary form – norma culta/literária) is the preferred in professions that require a good performance in direct, coherent and cohesive communication, with its possibility to add a serious, professional tone to a message. Its vocabulary may have regional differences as influence, but it is generally not regarded to have divergent dialects (when Brazilian Portuguese is not regarded to lack true dialectal variation). It can be divided in the very same geographical-based accents of low-variant Brazilian Portuguese, but it is extremely unusual to use high-variant Brazilian Portuguese with a lower class-sounding [phonological] sociolect (increasingly so among female, younger and urban speakers, who tend to absorb learned phonological characteristics – these associated with linguistic prestige much like the high-variant form – to their own vernacular speech).

Brazilian Portuguese further shares, for the most part, its truly formal form with European Portuguese – it is absent of nearly to fully all innovative characteristics of Brazilian speech –, but its proper use is not known to the vast majority of the population, generally to the exception of those who take, by the very minimum, university courses directly related to language, such as Letters. Were Galician and Portuguese to further have its most widely-spoken variants officially standardized, at least 6 of them (Galician, reintegrationist Galician, formal Portuguese, [vernacular/vernacular-like albeit prestigious] European Portuguese, and low- and high-variant standardizations of Brazilian Portuguese) would appear, making Galician-Portuguese more pluricentric than e.g. Serbo-Croatian, but such an ideology of official valuing of the vernaculars versus linguistic conservatism (including, nowadays in traces, the appearance of what some render as "pseudo-etymological" hypercorrections – so much that a whole period on the history of Portuguese orthography is named after this –, ignoring the course of evolution Portuguese has taken from Latin in favor of long-abandoned forms,  for example when it comes to affixes) is yet far to take place in both the very high and middle income Portuguese-speaking countries.