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 Portuguese today
The history of Portuguese
Names and writing system
The history of Portuguese Portuguese is a member of the Romance branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Following the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Vulgar Latin replaced nearly all the local languages, gradually developing along the Atlantic coast into the varieties of Portuguese which can be heard today. There are four main dialects of Portuguese: - Northern Portuguese (or Galician)
- Central Portuguese
- Southern Portuguese (including the dialect of Lisbon)
- Insular Portuguese (including Brazilian and Madeiran).
Standard Portuguese is based on the dialect of Lisbon. Dialect variation within Portugal is not great. However, Brazilian Portuguese varies from European Portuguese in some respects, just as British English differs from American English.An estimated 200 million people worldwide speak Portuguese, placing it the top ten most commonly spoken languages. Of these, just 10 million live in Portugal. The disproportionate influence of the language can be explained in terms of its colonial history. The Portuguese empire lasted from the fifteenth to the late twentieth centuries, stretching from Brazil in the Americas and Angola and Mozambique in Africa, to Macau in China and Japan.  
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