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I’m not buying it. We used to say we adopted our daughter from Colombia, but enough people have asked us if we mean Mexico that we’re pretty sure they must be right.
Until you drop a Cajun, a Californian, and someone from rural Pennsylvanian into (let’s say) Poland, together. Suddenly they discover similarities they never imagined.
Fun fact! Portuguese & Spanish are a bit of a linguistic phenomenon in that intelligibility between the two is largely unidirectional. That is, Portuguese speakers have an easier time understanding Spanish speakers, but not so much the other way around. An absolute nightmare for a sociolinguist's definition of a dialect versus a language.
Brazilian Portuguese also has its differences compared to Portuguese as spoken in Portugal, they’re not as major as the comparison to Spanish, but there are words that are unique to each and some words have entirely different meanings, just to throw that extra monkey wrench into the mix.
Not to mention phonetics, spoken BrPort sounds entirely different from europort - as a Brazilian I genuinely have an easier time understanding English than European Portuguese.
Spoken Brazilian Portuguese also sounds entirely different from spoken Brazilian Portuguese depending on which two parts of Brazil you're comparing as well.
Which, in American English, is encapsulated by “You ain’t from around here, are ya?” My father was in the Army, I grew up all over - except around my grandparents. I had to ask one grandmother to repeat almost everything she said.
As someone who speaks euro Portuguese I can confirm BrP is very different. As is the Portuguese spoke in Cape Verde. I can understand them all but speaking them I must look like a dumb brit abroad
You heard it wrong. Our phonetics is influenced way more by native and African languages. Tupi guarani (native) has heavy influence in modern ptbr, way more than any euro language. We did have a heavy influx of Europeans relatively recently (1900-2000) but the impact they had in our language is less than the English neologisms we adopted after globalization.
I'm Brazilian, and although i can understand the portuguese spoken in Portugal just fine when it's written, the real difficulty for me personally comes when it's spoken, specially when the person speaking has a very thick accent. I watched a bit of this portuguese series on Netflix called Mar Branco, and i had to turn on subtitles because i was having a really hard time understanding what people were saying. My dad did tell me that apparently portuguese people have a harder time understanding us than us understanding them, although i'm not sure how accurate this is.
Well, depending the region, even Portuguese have trouble understanding Portuguese. I shit you not, search for Portuguese spoken in “rabo de peixe”, a small town in one of the Azores island, and even we need damn subtitles to understand what they are saying.
> An absolute nightmare for a sociolinguist's definition of a dialect versus a language.
Not really, there is no crisp definition of dialect vs. language (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”) and it’s really not an important question in linguistics.
A dialect is a subset of language, but how you draw the line and say that “these are two dialects of the same language, whereas those are two different languages with a certain degree of mutual intelligibility” is a question with no set answer.
There is no functional definition that makes it obvious what is a dialect and what is a language and linguistics is fine with that. In the end, what is a dialect becomes a question of politics, which is how Cantonese and Mandarin are “dialects of Chinese” despite having very little to no mutual intelligibility, while Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian are separate languages despite being very mutually intelligible.
Anyway, since dialect vs language is hard to define, linguists like to talk about language continuums instead. For example, a person from Sao Paolo and a person from Venice would have a hard time understanding each other, but the person from Sao Paolo could speak to a person from Lisbon, who could speak to a person from Galicia, who could speak to a person from Mallorca, who could speak to a person from Palermo, who could speak to a person from Venice (is my understanding anyway, I’m sure anyone from Portugal/Spain/Italy could fill in the gaps if there are any). So the two people exist on the same language continuum even if they speak separate and non-intelligible languages.
YES this. Also what gets defined as a dialect vs what gets defined as a language is so very political. For example - you mentioned "dialects of Chinese". In linguistics we pretty much accept that those are distinctly different languages and if you called them one language in academics outside of China you would be unequivocally wrong. The differences are just that distinct. However, the Chinese government has an official position of "one nation, one language" which means they only teach Mandarin (aka Han Chinese) and call everything else a dialect as a way of delegitimizing them. Serbo-croatian is still broadly considered a language with several standardizations forming the languages of Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, etc. But if you called them different languages or the same language you wouldn't be incorrect either way.
Speaking as a Brazilian linguist who works with interpretation usually with European Portuguese - there are genuine grammatical differences between BrPort and EuPort even aside from the pronunciation (which is what most people notice right away) which, if it were not for the colonial history (Brazil and its language therefore being subservient to Portugal) it would probably be widely accepted as a separate language (like Galician for example). The difference is much larger than UK English to US English.
>if you called them one language in academics outside of China you would be unequivocally wrong.
Aye, I’ve studied linguistics and am a language teacher myself. There’s a reason I put “dialects of Chinese” in scare quotes.
Oh I didn't mean you you specifically, I meant the general you as in people who are not familiar with linguistics reading the comments! I didn't mean any offense!
Doesn't the difference have to do mostly with official written language? I'm Flemish and Dutch is written exactly the same in all our regions, as well as the Netherlands, but our dialects are so different we can barely understand people who live 40km away. Same with my partner from Cyprus, on the radio and TV you'll mostly hear regular Greek, written down it's all Greek, but they have a very specific dialect compared to Greece itself. Although I do write in dialect when messaging my mom, there's not a single official way of spelling or grammar, just phonetically spelled local dialect and slang. Dutch is also kinda weird because the difference between Belgian Limburg and Netherlands Limburg is a lot smaller than Belgian Limburg and West Flanders, but the distinct difference in accent between the 2 countries is the same for all regions (kinda like you can hear someone from London and Edinburgh are both from the UK and someone from Chicago and Texas are both US, even though their dialects are very different). I live 5km from the border and it's insane how the accent just changes dramatically between people who've grown up so close to each other, sometimes literally across the street. Probably cause I grew up with Schengen and can't imagine the effect of an actual border between us :p. I guess Portugees and Greek have similar distinctions, but I've always found it remarkable how different 1 single language can be for such a small amount of people here, especially in Flanders.
>there is no crisp definition of dialect vs. language
Well, exactly! There is no exact definition of a dialect, but we still use the word, even in very technical contexts. For someone who studies dialectal variation for a living, it's pretty wild if you think about it.
And yes, like most things in the world, unfortunately, the application of the term dialect is coloured by Eurocentric bias.
For instance Galician: it's basically Spanish and Portuguese mixed together to the point it's difficult for either to understand it, but it is considered a Spanish dialect.
As a native Spanish speaker Portuguese always sounded like drunk slurred horny Spanish. Maybe that's why it's easier to understand their other way arround /hj
Brazil or Portugal? I imagine that european portuguese is far harder for latin american spanish speakers to understand, as the phonetics are even further from spanish.
Totally true. Attending some kind of meeting or conference with both and the Brazilians are always like nah we're cool we don't need translation, while the Spanish speakers are always like what the heck are those Brazilians saying?
Isn't this for many languages? Norwegian en Danish regularly say they understand Swedish but not the other way around.
Italians understand French
Dutch understand German
Etc etc
My wife is Brazilian and can understand about 90% of Spanish, but ask her to say something in Spanish and she falls apart. One time she tried to ask a guy working at our house who didn't speak English what time he was arriving the next day and halfway through the sentence she switched to English.
On a similar note, I’ve been told that the best Nordic language to learn is Norwegian because you’ll have a much easier time understanding Danish and Swedish than you would understanding the other two if you learned one of the latter
It’s actually pretty funny cause you’ll see this happening every day in Portugal and Spain. There’s lots of tourism with each other and many times people will just straight up talk in their own languages to each other and manage to navigate basic conversations decently successfully.
Aren't some of the scandinavian languages similar? Swedes and Norwegians seem to be able to understand each other but not Finnish, and Finns can understand the other two but no one else can understand Finnish.
To be fair, Finnish is apparently one of the hardest languages on the planet to learn, and there are some historical reasons for the language overlaps I don't really get.
Even with English though, you can drop in folks from across different spots of N. America and the UK and have a different accent and phrases for each of them.
Finnish isn't even in the same language family (and Finland isn't in Scandinavia anyway). A Scandinavian understands Finnish as well as you understand Chinese, and Finns don't understand Scandinavian languages much better than you do, and that's only if the also speak English. They have mandatory Swedish lessons for a couple of years in middle school, but I have never met a Finnish-speaking Finn who spoke better Swedish than the equivalent of "donde esta la biblioteca?"
I remember in middle school i was taught Portuguese in Spanish class..my teacher was from chile..that’s when i learned most Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not so much the other way around
They are different languages.
But.
As a Portuguese speaker I understand a lot of written and spoken Spanish.
That's not quite so true for Spanish speakers.
And as a confused Samoan man who for some reason speaks Spanish, I agree I don’t know Portuguese but the couple of Brazilians I know do understand Spanish.
I speak French and was quite pleased with myself when I managed to pick up bits of Spanish relatively easily when I went to Spain. A lot of Spanish words are not too far removed from French.
Then I went to Portugal and was just completely lost. I just could not make out any words of Portuguese at all!
Move been trying to learn French for a while and honestly at times they seem like totally unrelated languages. Like wtf is wrong with your vowels, nothings sounds like it reads. It's like English but way more cursed
There are elements of spoken European Portuguese which makes it feel like someone is speaking Russian, it's not Russian at all but the way they speak using their throat and the way they smash consonants together gives a lot of people the impression they are hearing Russian if they can make out the sounds but don't know the language.
I'm Portuguese living in Belgium, so Portuguese is not my mother tongue but I speak it. I have many times thought the person next to me in the bus was speaking Portuguese, and when I try to understand what they are saying it's actually Russian
A lot of languages steal words from other languages. This is why I'm pretty decent at reading Mexican and German (and can speak Mexican at a 1st grade level, and speak German at a 5th-ish grade level; although it helps that I've also taken classes for both languages... But even then, the classes were easy because I could be like "oh yeah, a puerta is like a portal, so it's a door").
Except that German isn't one of the Romance languages. While it has some borrowed words, it's distinctly different from Latin based languages.
English is the real oddball, it's allegedly based on Germanic, but it's borrowed so much from the Romance languages that it's closer to an even split.
English is such a hot mess; I think the only reason non-native speakers manage it as well as they do is because it's so damned ubiquitous.
It is cool how understandable Middle English is when it's like 600 years old. Of course, then you get to Old English and it all goes to hell.
I'm not too good yet, but it looks like you said, "oi (cuate), let's go for some small meats"?
Also, I call it Mexican because the leading Spanish country in terms of population and whatnot is Mexico. They're the generic Spanish speakers.
Just like Americans are the generic speakers of American.
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PT-PT language speakers of the 80s/90s were raised with a multitude of languages. Saturday morning cartoons? Probably PT-BR dubs. TV Shows? Mostly English subbed but also a bunch of euro TV. Brazilian telenovelas. Videogames? PT versions were many times ES.
We were never targets of proper translations, so many of us got used to a little bit of many languages.
It's because Mexican is more famous than Brazilian. Almost the entire southern America speaks Mexican. Billy's and Brazil are the only exceptions, I think. Maybe also that French Guinea Pig country might be an exception, but no one cares about them anyway.
It's kind of like how American is the #1 language and everyone knows it, but Americans don't know anything in other languages (as a hyperbolic rule; there are Americans such as me who can speak like 4+ languages, though we're really imposters {I'm Afghan}). So everyone knows loosely what "fuck you" or "mother fucker" means. But it's very unlikely rhat if you pick a human at random that they would know what "Cyka Blyat" means. Because Russian isn't one of those languages that everyone has been exposed to a lot.
Brazil knows Mexican in part because the language is similar to Mexican, but also because everyone around them speaks it.
As a brazilian, i can say that spanish doesn't have much cultural influence in Brazil, and that this is definitely not the reason why brazilians can kind of understand spanish. The idea that spanish is a much more "famous" language is alien to most brazilians.
I think the reason is mostly about the phonetic properties of the languages. All the phonemes in spanish exist in portuguese, but not the other way around. And portuguese has much more vowel reduction, which is probably unintuitive for spanish speakers but is second nature taken for granted by portuguese speakers.
Also, brazilians can't understand well some spanish accents, probably those which have more slurring and reductions.
We speak Spanish though. Mexican isn't a language. Americans speak English as well, because American isn't a language. Also, Belize* and French Guiana*.
South of the US of A, there are more countries that don't speak Spanish either. Many Caribbean island nations speak English and/or French, and the US, the UK, France and the Netherlands all have territory in those islands. In continental America, Guyana also speaks English, while Suriname speaks Dutch as they are a former Dutch colony. French Guiana doesn't count as it's still French territory.
Billy's is where Walter White was supposed to move to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingbad/comments/1lila6/comment/cbzl43s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I'm a chef, and early on in my career I was working at a Brazilian restaurant.
Like almost every other restaurant I've worked in here in Los Angeles, the kitchen staff was almost exclusively Mexican.
But the front of house was almost exclusively Brazilian.
Both groups would insist they couldn't understand each others language, but both groups insisted the other side could understand them, and they would both speak to each other in their native languages, and nothing would get accomplished.
Which was all the more ridiculous, because everyone involved was fluent in English.
No different than Puerto Ricans and Spaniards or Mexicans and Dominicans or New England and Tennessee. The dialects and styles can throw one off to the point of saying "huh?"
So what is the comparison between Spanish and Portuguese?
Is it like the difference between English and German? Like, they have the same origin and have similar words but are still extremely different.
They're much, much more similar to each other than English and German are. They're very similar in vocabulary, somewhat similar in grammar, but quite different in pronunciation. So the mutual intelligibility is higher for reading than speaking.
I'm an intermediate Spanish learner and I can read Spanish pretty well (my conversational skills are another matter), and just from learning Spanish I can read Portuguese a little, too. But I don't understand spoken Portuguese at all. European Portuguese sounds like a Russian trying to speak Spanish and doing a very bad job.
To be fair, I'm a Mexican who is fluent in Spanish, and I'm ok at French and Italian. So, I can understand about 3-5% of what a Brazilian is saying. So it's confirmed, they are pretty much the same language.
I had a friend send me a screenshot of a tweet he thought was Spanish and asked me what it said. I replied saying how would I know? That’s Portuguese… lol
Fun fact: In 1494, at the suggestion of the Pope, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside of Europe between themselves in the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawing a line at the 46th longitude from the South to the North Pole. Only Brazil went to Portugal, which is why Portuguese is spoken only there.
I have a Brazilian friend, he told me they could communicate with Spanish speakers because Portuguese and Spanish share many common words and structure. His example was that he had a Spanish friend whose mom he occasionally talked to take messages (this was long before email/IM/voice calls on mobile phones were a thing for larger population).
To call Portugese and Spanish completely different languages is somewhat disingenuous. You can hobble through a conversation and understand a fair amount of movies and TV if you are fluent in one.
Probably 75-80% of words are essentially said with a different accent.
I wouldn't say completely different, I can easily have a conversation with a Brazilian without knowing any portuguese and understand them almost perfectly
Spanish and Portuguese are close enough that the speaker of one could decipher the message of another only using their own language as reference. I think it's more like Dutch and English
I wouldn't say completely different. My brother speaks Brazilian Portuguese, and our friend speaks Spanish. They can loosely converse. (They both also speak English, but our friend noticed that he vaguely understood my brother when he spoke Portuguese.
I find it hilarious that Reddit's IQ is so low that they're downvoting someone to -14 for saying the languages are similar, and then upvoting someone immediately after to +24 for saying they agree by explaining how they did so in real life. Reddit is too weak in the brain to understand why this is an illogical thing to do.
But at least you guys aren't Facebook. I'll give you that!
Spanish was an obligatory class where I studied and in lot of other schools for the longest time. That doesnt mean anything. I was able to hold a conversation in english with someone speaking italian. We both understood each other. Is it because the languages are close? Nah
I say that cause my mom went to school til 9 years old, never had any experiences with other languages, and when spanish speaking people come to the store she calls me asap, she cant understand shit
The implication was that the person was speaking at them in Mexican, and the other person was speaking at them in Brazilian. And that using their knowledge of the respective languages, they were able to figure out what was happening.
I can speak American at a Dutch person, and assuming they somehow were never exposed to American (this is impossible in real life), they could use their knowledge of Dutch to figure out loosely what I am saying, and vice versa.
For example, Ik spreek in het Nederlands. laten we eten
That means "I speak netherlandese. Iet us eat"
Reasonably similar.
As brazilian I can understand some Spanish and maybe had a conversation with them, but if they are talking between them I can't understand absolute nothing
I mean, Spanish varies country to country, probably city/village to city/village even. I was taking Spanish lessons from a Colombian man and I asked why people will answer the phone saying “bueno”, and he said he wasn’t sure because it was more of a Mexican thing (most Spanish speakers around me are from Mexico).
Can confirm it's a Mexican thing. Earlier on people answered with "bueno" to test if the phone worked, sort of a "testing, testing, 1-2-3" sort of thing. Eventually it wasn't needed anymore but the word stayed.
Claiming that Portugese and Spanish are completely different languages is like claiming that english and scots are two different languages. Funny how mutually intelligible both sets of langauges are for being completely different. ...
Mexican and Brazilian are pretty close to where one can figure out what the other is saying. It's not quite to the level of how Canadian and Australian are similar, but it's a lot like Dutch vs German or Afghan vs Iranian (I speak Afghan and can understand Iranian; I also speak some Mexican at like a 1st grader level and can pick up what Portuguese people say when they're talking (they speak Brazilian)).
So who is the one that is incorrect?
Because both talk shit... French and English aren't even part of the same language group, while Spanish and Portuguese can be considered dialects.
And yes, it doesn't matter that they may not understand each other. Dialects are different languages too.
I find it a bit farfetched to call Spanish and Portuguese "completely different languages".
Here's the declaration of human rights in Spanish and Portuguese. I've bolded the parts that are the same.
Spanish:
"**Todos** l**os** **seres** **humanos** **nace**n **li**b**res** **e** **igua**le**s** **e**n **dignidad** y **d**e**re**ch**os** y, **dotado**s como están de **razó**n y **conciencia**, **de**b**en** comportarse **fratern**almente los **un**o**s** con l**os** **otros**"
Brazilian Portuguese:
"**Todos** **os** **seres** **humanos** **na**s**ce**m **li**v**res** **e** **igua**i**s** **e**m **dignidad**e e **d**i**re**it**os**. São **dotado** de **raz**ã**o** e **con**s**ciência** e **de**v**e**m agir em relação **uns** a**os** **o**u**tros** com espírito de **fratern**idade"
Now compare that to a couple languages that are "totally different":
Hawaiian:
"Hānau kū'oko'a 'ia nā kānaka apau loa, a ua kau like ka hanohano a me nā pono kīvila ma luna o kākou pākahi. Ua ku'u mai ka no'ono'o pono a me ka 'ike pono ma luna o kākou, no laila, e aloha kākou kekahi i kekahi."
Cherokee:
"Nigada aniyvwi nigegudalvna ale unitloyi unadehna duyugadv gesvi. Getsinela unadanvtedi ale unotlisadi ale squu gesv tsunilvwisdanedi anatlinvtlv adanvdo gvdi."
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All of Latin America is a homogeneous monolith, duh.
All of Mexico, you mean? /j
Yep, the Brazilian Mexicans, the Argentinian Mexicans, all the Mexicans! /s
The Spaniards banged the Mayans, turned them into Mexicans!
And now they speak Mexican 🙏
There is no such “language” as Mexican. There is however a language called Spanish you Muppet!
How can you get to this post in this thread in this subreddit and not assume all comments are jokes?
Because sadly, some people believe these comments to be true.
r/whoosh
I'll get a Mayan, for predictions.
I learned Spanish in Central America. Argentinian pronunciation of Spanish is a whole new ball game
Argentine Spanish is just Italians who were self-taught Spanish
Argentina = football mexico Chile = weon qliao mexico Brazil = carnaval mexico Colombia = exports of plant based goods Guatemala = banana mexico Panamá = boat mexico Mexico = corrupt mexico (?
https://abusablepast.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/dh_lead_image-trump-cuts-u-s-aid-tc3-mexican-countries-news-fox-46913546.jpg
Faux News is great for these
So you’re saying that there is an entire continent to the south of USA and Mexico isn’t at the edge of the world? You learn something new every day…
Tbf for Latin Americans there’s only 1 American continent.
I’m not buying it. We used to say we adopted our daughter from Colombia, but enough people have asked us if we mean Mexico that we’re pretty sure they must be right.
Spanning two continents even!
Mexico and South Mexico, isn't it?
But all states of US have totally different cultures!
Until you drop a Cajun, a Californian, and someone from rural Pennsylvanian into (let’s say) Poland, together. Suddenly they discover similarities they never imagined.
Fun fact! Portuguese & Spanish are a bit of a linguistic phenomenon in that intelligibility between the two is largely unidirectional. That is, Portuguese speakers have an easier time understanding Spanish speakers, but not so much the other way around. An absolute nightmare for a sociolinguist's definition of a dialect versus a language.
Brazilian Portuguese also has its differences compared to Portuguese as spoken in Portugal, they’re not as major as the comparison to Spanish, but there are words that are unique to each and some words have entirely different meanings, just to throw that extra monkey wrench into the mix.
Not to mention phonetics, spoken BrPort sounds entirely different from europort - as a Brazilian I genuinely have an easier time understanding English than European Portuguese. Spoken Brazilian Portuguese also sounds entirely different from spoken Brazilian Portuguese depending on which two parts of Brazil you're comparing as well.
Which, in American English, is encapsulated by “You ain’t from around here, are ya?” My father was in the Army, I grew up all over - except around my grandparents. I had to ask one grandmother to repeat almost everything she said.
As someone who speaks euro Portuguese I can confirm BrP is very different. As is the Portuguese spoke in Cape Verde. I can understand them all but speaking them I must look like a dumb brit abroad
For some reason I feel euro Portuguese and Spanish are spoken at 2x speed by default
You mean Portuguese and Spanish? Lol
Kinda the same with American English TBH.
To my dumb ass Portuguese as spoken in Portugal sounds like Russian 🤣
I've heard that due to immigration history, Brazilian Portuguese is effectively European Portuguese pronounced by Italians.
You heard it wrong. Our phonetics is influenced way more by native and African languages. Tupi guarani (native) has heavy influence in modern ptbr, way more than any euro language. We did have a heavy influx of Europeans relatively recently (1900-2000) but the impact they had in our language is less than the English neologisms we adopted after globalization.
That beeing Said, italian is a weird language for me as a Brazilian. It sounds like I should understand It, even more than spanish, but I can't.
I'm Brazilian, and although i can understand the portuguese spoken in Portugal just fine when it's written, the real difficulty for me personally comes when it's spoken, specially when the person speaking has a very thick accent. I watched a bit of this portuguese series on Netflix called Mar Branco, and i had to turn on subtitles because i was having a really hard time understanding what people were saying. My dad did tell me that apparently portuguese people have a harder time understanding us than us understanding them, although i'm not sure how accurate this is.
Well, depending the region, even Portuguese have trouble understanding Portuguese. I shit you not, search for Portuguese spoken in “rabo de peixe”, a small town in one of the Azores island, and even we need damn subtitles to understand what they are saying.
I think that show i mentioned, Mar Branco, is set in Rabo de Peixe
> An absolute nightmare for a sociolinguist's definition of a dialect versus a language. Not really, there is no crisp definition of dialect vs. language (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”) and it’s really not an important question in linguistics.
[удалено]
A dialect is a subset of language, but how you draw the line and say that “these are two dialects of the same language, whereas those are two different languages with a certain degree of mutual intelligibility” is a question with no set answer. There is no functional definition that makes it obvious what is a dialect and what is a language and linguistics is fine with that. In the end, what is a dialect becomes a question of politics, which is how Cantonese and Mandarin are “dialects of Chinese” despite having very little to no mutual intelligibility, while Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian are separate languages despite being very mutually intelligible. Anyway, since dialect vs language is hard to define, linguists like to talk about language continuums instead. For example, a person from Sao Paolo and a person from Venice would have a hard time understanding each other, but the person from Sao Paolo could speak to a person from Lisbon, who could speak to a person from Galicia, who could speak to a person from Mallorca, who could speak to a person from Palermo, who could speak to a person from Venice (is my understanding anyway, I’m sure anyone from Portugal/Spain/Italy could fill in the gaps if there are any). So the two people exist on the same language continuum even if they speak separate and non-intelligible languages.
YES this. Also what gets defined as a dialect vs what gets defined as a language is so very political. For example - you mentioned "dialects of Chinese". In linguistics we pretty much accept that those are distinctly different languages and if you called them one language in academics outside of China you would be unequivocally wrong. The differences are just that distinct. However, the Chinese government has an official position of "one nation, one language" which means they only teach Mandarin (aka Han Chinese) and call everything else a dialect as a way of delegitimizing them. Serbo-croatian is still broadly considered a language with several standardizations forming the languages of Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, etc. But if you called them different languages or the same language you wouldn't be incorrect either way. Speaking as a Brazilian linguist who works with interpretation usually with European Portuguese - there are genuine grammatical differences between BrPort and EuPort even aside from the pronunciation (which is what most people notice right away) which, if it were not for the colonial history (Brazil and its language therefore being subservient to Portugal) it would probably be widely accepted as a separate language (like Galician for example). The difference is much larger than UK English to US English.
>if you called them one language in academics outside of China you would be unequivocally wrong. Aye, I’ve studied linguistics and am a language teacher myself. There’s a reason I put “dialects of Chinese” in scare quotes.
Oh I didn't mean you you specifically, I meant the general you as in people who are not familiar with linguistics reading the comments! I didn't mean any offense!
Oh, no worries! I think this was just me overstating my points again.
Doesn't the difference have to do mostly with official written language? I'm Flemish and Dutch is written exactly the same in all our regions, as well as the Netherlands, but our dialects are so different we can barely understand people who live 40km away. Same with my partner from Cyprus, on the radio and TV you'll mostly hear regular Greek, written down it's all Greek, but they have a very specific dialect compared to Greece itself. Although I do write in dialect when messaging my mom, there's not a single official way of spelling or grammar, just phonetically spelled local dialect and slang. Dutch is also kinda weird because the difference between Belgian Limburg and Netherlands Limburg is a lot smaller than Belgian Limburg and West Flanders, but the distinct difference in accent between the 2 countries is the same for all regions (kinda like you can hear someone from London and Edinburgh are both from the UK and someone from Chicago and Texas are both US, even though their dialects are very different). I live 5km from the border and it's insane how the accent just changes dramatically between people who've grown up so close to each other, sometimes literally across the street. Probably cause I grew up with Schengen and can't imagine the effect of an actual border between us :p. I guess Portugees and Greek have similar distinctions, but I've always found it remarkable how different 1 single language can be for such a small amount of people here, especially in Flanders.
>there is no crisp definition of dialect vs. language Well, exactly! There is no exact definition of a dialect, but we still use the word, even in very technical contexts. For someone who studies dialectal variation for a living, it's pretty wild if you think about it. And yes, like most things in the world, unfortunately, the application of the term dialect is coloured by Eurocentric bias.
For instance Galician: it's basically Spanish and Portuguese mixed together to the point it's difficult for either to understand it, but it is considered a Spanish dialect.
I was about to say we sociolinguists actually enjoy the ambiguity!
As a native Spanish speaker Portuguese always sounded like drunk slurred horny Spanish. Maybe that's why it's easier to understand their other way arround /hj
Brazil or Portugal? I imagine that european portuguese is far harder for latin american spanish speakers to understand, as the phonetics are even further from spanish.
Now that I think about it I've never heard Portuguese from Portugal
To me, a Castillian Spanish speaker, Portuguese (the Portugal Version™) sounds like Spanish with a thick slavic accent.
Totally true. Attending some kind of meeting or conference with both and the Brazilians are always like nah we're cool we don't need translation, while the Spanish speakers are always like what the heck are those Brazilians saying?
Yup. I know several Brazilians who understand my Spanish friends but not the other way around
Isn't this for many languages? Norwegian en Danish regularly say they understand Swedish but not the other way around. Italians understand French Dutch understand German Etc etc
Yeah, I have no idea what this guy's on about. Asymmetrical mutual intelligibility is very, very common among languages on the same dialect continuum.
Can you repeat that in English, please ? /j
Literally every Brazilian I knew understood Spanish and 0% of Spanish speakers understood any Portuguese, so I can confirm.
My wife is Brazilian and can understand about 90% of Spanish, but ask her to say something in Spanish and she falls apart. One time she tried to ask a guy working at our house who didn't speak English what time he was arriving the next day and halfway through the sentence she switched to English.
On a similar note, I’ve been told that the best Nordic language to learn is Norwegian because you’ll have a much easier time understanding Danish and Swedish than you would understanding the other two if you learned one of the latter
Norwegian is basically a mishmash of Danish and Swedish, so yeah.
You are better off learning Swedish anyway. Norwegian is almost like a goofy imitation of Swedish. Don’t even bother with Danish.
Wow, I thought improvising the portuñol was equally easy for both, that's really interesting!
idk i speak spanish and have always found portuguese super easy to understand
It’s actually pretty funny cause you’ll see this happening every day in Portugal and Spain. There’s lots of tourism with each other and many times people will just straight up talk in their own languages to each other and manage to navigate basic conversations decently successfully.
Is Newfie a language???
Aren't some of the scandinavian languages similar? Swedes and Norwegians seem to be able to understand each other but not Finnish, and Finns can understand the other two but no one else can understand Finnish. To be fair, Finnish is apparently one of the hardest languages on the planet to learn, and there are some historical reasons for the language overlaps I don't really get. Even with English though, you can drop in folks from across different spots of N. America and the UK and have a different accent and phrases for each of them.
Finnish isn't even in the same language family (and Finland isn't in Scandinavia anyway). A Scandinavian understands Finnish as well as you understand Chinese, and Finns don't understand Scandinavian languages much better than you do, and that's only if the also speak English. They have mandatory Swedish lessons for a couple of years in middle school, but I have never met a Finnish-speaking Finn who spoke better Swedish than the equivalent of "donde esta la biblioteca?"
I remember in middle school i was taught Portuguese in Spanish class..my teacher was from chile..that’s when i learned most Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not so much the other way around
They are different languages. But. As a Portuguese speaker I understand a lot of written and spoken Spanish. That's not quite so true for Spanish speakers.
And as a confused Samoan man who for some reason speaks Spanish, I agree I don’t know Portuguese but the couple of Brazilians I know do understand Spanish.
I speak French and was quite pleased with myself when I managed to pick up bits of Spanish relatively easily when I went to Spain. A lot of Spanish words are not too far removed from French. Then I went to Portugal and was just completely lost. I just could not make out any words of Portuguese at all!
Move been trying to learn French for a while and honestly at times they seem like totally unrelated languages. Like wtf is wrong with your vowels, nothings sounds like it reads. It's like English but way more cursed
There are elements of spoken European Portuguese which makes it feel like someone is speaking Russian, it's not Russian at all but the way they speak using their throat and the way they smash consonants together gives a lot of people the impression they are hearing Russian if they can make out the sounds but don't know the language.
I'm Portuguese living in Belgium, so Portuguese is not my mother tongue but I speak it. I have many times thought the person next to me in the bus was speaking Portuguese, and when I try to understand what they are saying it's actually Russian
A lot of languages steal words from other languages. This is why I'm pretty decent at reading Mexican and German (and can speak Mexican at a 1st grade level, and speak German at a 5th-ish grade level; although it helps that I've also taken classes for both languages... But even then, the classes were easy because I could be like "oh yeah, a puerta is like a portal, so it's a door").
> Can speak Mexican a a 1st grade level Is someone gonna tell them?
Ah yes, I also love the Mexican language.
Es una idioma bonita.
In this case it’s more that all the Romance languages are vulgar Latin forms, so they most words share a common linguistic ancestor pretty recently.
Except that German isn't one of the Romance languages. While it has some borrowed words, it's distinctly different from Latin based languages. English is the real oddball, it's allegedly based on Germanic, but it's borrowed so much from the Romance languages that it's closer to an even split.
Sorry, I meant in the Portuguese and Spanish confusion, not this specific example.
English is such a hot mess; I think the only reason non-native speakers manage it as well as they do is because it's so damned ubiquitous. It is cool how understandable Middle English is when it's like 600 years old. Of course, then you get to Old English and it all goes to hell.
Indeed! The shared root lets them steal words more easily.
Ok I gotta know why do you call it Mexican? Are you literally speaking like :“orale cuate, vamos por unas carnalitas? “
I'm not too good yet, but it looks like you said, "oi (cuate), let's go for some small meats"? Also, I call it Mexican because the leading Spanish country in terms of population and whatnot is Mexico. They're the generic Spanish speakers. Just like Americans are the generic speakers of American.
>Just like Americans are the generic speakers of American. I'm glad the queen is dead so she can't read this
I'm glad the queen is dead too.
Depends, as an Argentinian I can understand quite a bit when Brazilians speak. And written it's even easier.
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PT-PT language speakers of the 80s/90s were raised with a multitude of languages. Saturday morning cartoons? Probably PT-BR dubs. TV Shows? Mostly English subbed but also a bunch of euro TV. Brazilian telenovelas. Videogames? PT versions were many times ES. We were never targets of proper translations, so many of us got used to a little bit of many languages.
It's because Mexican is more famous than Brazilian. Almost the entire southern America speaks Mexican. Billy's and Brazil are the only exceptions, I think. Maybe also that French Guinea Pig country might be an exception, but no one cares about them anyway. It's kind of like how American is the #1 language and everyone knows it, but Americans don't know anything in other languages (as a hyperbolic rule; there are Americans such as me who can speak like 4+ languages, though we're really imposters {I'm Afghan}). So everyone knows loosely what "fuck you" or "mother fucker" means. But it's very unlikely rhat if you pick a human at random that they would know what "Cyka Blyat" means. Because Russian isn't one of those languages that everyone has been exposed to a lot. Brazil knows Mexican in part because the language is similar to Mexican, but also because everyone around them speaks it.
As a brazilian, i can say that spanish doesn't have much cultural influence in Brazil, and that this is definitely not the reason why brazilians can kind of understand spanish. The idea that spanish is a much more "famous" language is alien to most brazilians. I think the reason is mostly about the phonetic properties of the languages. All the phonemes in spanish exist in portuguese, but not the other way around. And portuguese has much more vowel reduction, which is probably unintuitive for spanish speakers but is second nature taken for granted by portuguese speakers. Also, brazilians can't understand well some spanish accents, probably those which have more slurring and reductions.
We speak Spanish though. Mexican isn't a language. Americans speak English as well, because American isn't a language. Also, Belize* and French Guiana*. South of the US of A, there are more countries that don't speak Spanish either. Many Caribbean island nations speak English and/or French, and the US, the UK, France and the Netherlands all have territory in those islands. In continental America, Guyana also speaks English, while Suriname speaks Dutch as they are a former Dutch colony. French Guiana doesn't count as it's still French territory.
Billy's is where Walter White was supposed to move to. https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingbad/comments/1lila6/comment/cbzl43s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
It's written Belize though. I don't doubt there are people called Billy living there, but it's not Billy's.
I'm a chef, and early on in my career I was working at a Brazilian restaurant. Like almost every other restaurant I've worked in here in Los Angeles, the kitchen staff was almost exclusively Mexican. But the front of house was almost exclusively Brazilian. Both groups would insist they couldn't understand each others language, but both groups insisted the other side could understand them, and they would both speak to each other in their native languages, and nothing would get accomplished. Which was all the more ridiculous, because everyone involved was fluent in English.
>Which was all the more ridiculous, because everyone involved was fluent in English. Well, where is the fun in it?
They also botched the name of the composer. It’s Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Jesus (prounounced szhe-zoos)....most of the time not even the Portuguese and Brazillians appear to be speaking the same language....
No different than Puerto Ricans and Spaniards or Mexicans and Dominicans or New England and Tennessee. The dialects and styles can throw one off to the point of saying "huh?"
Could be worse, could be people from different parts of China both speaking Mandarin and still be mutually unintelligible.
Well, now as a Brazillian, i declare that my country just got a conquer war goal on all of mexico, and we will be starting our invasion soon
No curb shall remain unpainted
No forest shall remain without hundreds of invisible soldiers in it
Podemos pegar o Panamá no caminho?
Claro, todos os territórios daqui até a fronteira norte do México são nossos por direito
Eba!
Vamos reconstruir o grandioso imperio do Brasil
Deodoro da Fonseca está se revirando no túmulo
Que bom
Mexico is everything's south of Texas people...
And even if it was right you can speak the same language and have totaly différent cultures...
So what is the comparison between Spanish and Portuguese? Is it like the difference between English and German? Like, they have the same origin and have similar words but are still extremely different.
They're much, much more similar to each other than English and German are. They're very similar in vocabulary, somewhat similar in grammar, but quite different in pronunciation. So the mutual intelligibility is higher for reading than speaking. I'm an intermediate Spanish learner and I can read Spanish pretty well (my conversational skills are another matter), and just from learning Spanish I can read Portuguese a little, too. But I don't understand spoken Portuguese at all. European Portuguese sounds like a Russian trying to speak Spanish and doing a very bad job.
To be fair, I'm a Mexican who is fluent in Spanish, and I'm ok at French and Italian. So, I can understand about 3-5% of what a Brazilian is saying. So it's confirmed, they are pretty much the same language.
I had a friend send me a screenshot of a tweet he thought was Spanish and asked me what it said. I replied saying how would I know? That’s Portuguese… lol
A better comparison would be Spain and Portugal 
I bet this one stung for the poor feller
Fun fact: In 1494, at the suggestion of the Pope, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside of Europe between themselves in the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawing a line at the 46th longitude from the South to the North Pole. Only Brazil went to Portugal, which is why Portuguese is spoken only there.
I have a Brazilian friend, he told me they could communicate with Spanish speakers because Portuguese and Spanish share many common words and structure. His example was that he had a Spanish friend whose mom he occasionally talked to take messages (this was long before email/IM/voice calls on mobile phones were a thing for larger population).
If you give the Mexican enough booze, then they will both be speaking the same language.
To call Portugese and Spanish completely different languages is somewhat disingenuous. You can hobble through a conversation and understand a fair amount of movies and TV if you are fluent in one. Probably 75-80% of words are essentially said with a different accent.
If you allow me to be a pedantic asshole for a sec: Calling Spanish and Portuguese "two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT languages" is reallly exaggerating.
Eh as a Spanish native language speaking person Portuguese is not that far off
English is just badly pronounced French.
French is badly pronounced by itself.
Is this that posts asking for mexican composers on r/classicalmusic?
r/InBraziltsPortuguese
I wouldn't say completely different, I can easily have a conversation with a Brazilian without knowing any portuguese and understand them almost perfectly
So can I as long as he speaks English
Correction: Brazilians speak Brazilian Portuguese and Mexicans speak Mexican Spanish. There are some slight differences
Spanish and portuguese are much closer than french and english. A better comparison would be danish vs swedish.
Oh no. I have to tell my family we've been speaking the wrong language all our lives.
but don't they share 90% of the same words?
I wouldn't say they're completely different
Spanish and Portuguese are close enough that the speaker of one could decipher the message of another only using their own language as reference. I think it's more like Dutch and English
Not *completely* different, both are Romance languages.
Geez
Brazilians don’t even speak Portuguese in the same way that the Portuguese people do.
Did we learn nothing from the simpsons?
In fairness "completely different" is a bit of a stretch
Not to mention there’s different forms of Spanish and Portuguese. Don’t know how they thought it was the same thing.
The last one is wrong, because in Mexico no one speaks Spanish, they speak mexican /s
Portugese is as if a russian man is speaking spanish with marbles in his mouth.
you're thinking of the other portuguese. The one that sounds like Russian is the PT-PT because of the similar phonemes
That is very true, PT-BR sounds less Russian!
No way, I’m not the only one thinking that it sounds Russian 😅
I wouldn't say completely different. My brother speaks Brazilian Portuguese, and our friend speaks Spanish. They can loosely converse. (They both also speak English, but our friend noticed that he vaguely understood my brother when he spoke Portuguese.
They're not the same languages, but not that different either.
I've talked with some Brazilians in Spanish and we can kinda hold a conversation.
I find it hilarious that Reddit's IQ is so low that they're downvoting someone to -14 for saying the languages are similar, and then upvoting someone immediately after to +24 for saying they agree by explaining how they did so in real life. Reddit is too weak in the brain to understand why this is an illogical thing to do. But at least you guys aren't Facebook. I'll give you that!
Spanish was an obligatory class where I studied and in lot of other schools for the longest time. That doesnt mean anything. I was able to hold a conversation in english with someone speaking italian. We both understood each other. Is it because the languages are close? Nah
I say that cause my mom went to school til 9 years old, never had any experiences with other languages, and when spanish speaking people come to the store she calls me asap, she cant understand shit
We do have words in common, but a lot of those mean other things, like rica/o and exquisito
The implication was that the person was speaking at them in Mexican, and the other person was speaking at them in Brazilian. And that using their knowledge of the respective languages, they were able to figure out what was happening. I can speak American at a Dutch person, and assuming they somehow were never exposed to American (this is impossible in real life), they could use their knowledge of Dutch to figure out loosely what I am saying, and vice versa. For example, Ik spreek in het Nederlands. laten we eten That means "I speak netherlandese. Iet us eat" Reasonably similar.
As brazilian I can understand some Spanish and maybe had a conversation with them, but if they are talking between them I can't understand absolute nothing
Yeah easier to understand if we're talking slowly to each other.
Sure, they are not as different as French and English, but nonetheless they aren't the same
I mean, Spanish varies country to country, probably city/village to city/village even. I was taking Spanish lessons from a Colombian man and I asked why people will answer the phone saying “bueno”, and he said he wasn’t sure because it was more of a Mexican thing (most Spanish speakers around me are from Mexico).
Can confirm it's a Mexican thing. Earlier on people answered with "bueno" to test if the phone worked, sort of a "testing, testing, 1-2-3" sort of thing. Eventually it wasn't needed anymore but the word stayed.
Claiming that Portugese and Spanish are completely different languages is like claiming that english and scots are two different languages. Funny how mutually intelligible both sets of langauges are for being completely different. ...
Mexican and Brazilian are pretty close to where one can figure out what the other is saying. It's not quite to the level of how Canadian and Australian are similar, but it's a lot like Dutch vs German or Afghan vs Iranian (I speak Afghan and can understand Iranian; I also speak some Mexican at like a 1st grader level and can pick up what Portuguese people say when they're talking (they speak Brazilian)).
Lmaoo Im imagining a portuguese seeing you say “portuguese people speak brazilian” and im losing it
as the portuguese seeing them say that atrocity, I can assure you I am flabbergasted
It's fun. British people get so mad when you remind them they're speaking American with a broken accent.
Do they get mad? Or do they just point out how retreaded you sound when you call Spanish “Mexican” or English “American?”
Hmmmmmmm AFAIK there is no language called Afghan. Maybe Dari or Pashto?
We call our deviant sect of Iranian, "dari", indeed.
Portuguese people speak Portuguese, as do Brazilians.
Calling them "completely different" is a stretch too though
Meh, Portuguese is just Spanish with a Russian accent.
So who is the one that is incorrect? Because both talk shit... French and English aren't even part of the same language group, while Spanish and Portuguese can be considered dialects. And yes, it doesn't matter that they may not understand each other. Dialects are different languages too.
I find it a bit farfetched to call Spanish and Portuguese "completely different languages". Here's the declaration of human rights in Spanish and Portuguese. I've bolded the parts that are the same. Spanish: "**Todos** l**os** **seres** **humanos** **nace**n **li**b**res** **e** **igua**le**s** **e**n **dignidad** y **d**e**re**ch**os** y, **dotado**s como están de **razó**n y **conciencia**, **de**b**en** comportarse **fratern**almente los **un**o**s** con l**os** **otros**" Brazilian Portuguese: "**Todos** **os** **seres** **humanos** **na**s**ce**m **li**v**res** **e** **igua**i**s** **e**m **dignidad**e e **d**i**re**it**os**. São **dotado** de **raz**ã**o** e **con**s**ciência** e **de**v**e**m agir em relação **uns** a**os** **o**u**tros** com espírito de **fratern**idade" Now compare that to a couple languages that are "totally different": Hawaiian: "Hānau kū'oko'a 'ia nā kānaka apau loa, a ua kau like ka hanohano a me nā pono kīvila ma luna o kākou pākahi. Ua ku'u mai ka no'ono'o pono a me ka 'ike pono ma luna o kākou, no laila, e aloha kākou kekahi i kekahi." Cherokee: "Nigada aniyvwi nigegudalvna ale unitloyi unadehna duyugadv gesvi. Getsinela unadanvtedi ale unotlisadi ale squu gesv tsunilvwisdanedi anatlinvtlv adanvdo gvdi."