The Great 2009 Portuguese Spelling Reform
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| 03-01-2009| Language & CommunicationI was alerted this morning by Paulissima’s excellent post on Global Voices to a BBC News article announcing a new Portuguese spelling reform.
Brazilian Portuguese or Portuguese Portuguese?
190 million Brazilian Portuguese speakers will wrestle with first and which has also been agreed upon by Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipeo.
Brazil, by far the biggest lusophone nation, is the first to adopt the new spelling rules. Spellings are standardised, and silent consonants are removed in order for words to be spelt more phonetically, turning, for example “optimo” (great) into “otimo”.
Whether it will be considered great in the future is open to debate, as always with spelling reforms; prescriptivists (language should be X and Y, people should conform to type in order to communicate effectively) will argue with descriptivitists (language is X and Y, don’t try and impose ‘artificial’ rules on everyone) about which version is right.
Both sides have valid arguments which mean the debate which will ever be won by either side conclusively, in Portuguese or any other language.
I don’t speak Portuguese yet, although I would like to one day, but Wikipedia says the differences between Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese Portuguese are similar to the differences between British English and American English (feel free to write a comment if you have a good knowledge of the different languages):
…the differences between European Portuguese and standard Brazilian Portuguese are comparable to the ones found between British and standard American English. As with many languages, the differences between standard Brazilian Portuguese and its informal vernacular are quite significant, though lexicon and most of the grammar rules remain the same.
There are also the cultural, historical, economic and political factors, Portuguese having originated in Portugal of course.
As things stand in terms of population sizes, GDP and number of native speakers, it doesn’t look like there’s much the defenders of Portuguese Portuguese will be able to do, given their government has signed up to the plan, apart from refusing to use the new spellings of course!
The BBC seems to have sided with the Brazilians from the start by naming its Portuguese language efforts BBC Brasil and announcing that:
BBC Brasil will adopt the new spelling changes in February when its site will also be revamped.
From a communication and living together perspective, I tend to side with the prescriptivists and I don’t see any real reasons why you can’t have the best of both worlds, athough I can imagine the heated debate and outrage it would probable cause if the Americans or Australians suddenly tried to impose new spelling or grammar rules on the British.
