Portuguese phonology
The phonology of Portuguese varies among dialects, in extreme cases leading to some difficulties in intelligibility. This article focuses on the pronunciations that are generally regarded as standard. Since Portuguese is a pluricentric language, and differences between European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese can be considerable, varieties are distinguished whenever necessary.
One of the most salient differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese is their prosody. European Portuguese is a stress-timed language, with reduction, devoicing or even deletion of unstressed vowels and a general tolerance of syllable-final consonants. Brazilian Portuguese, on the other hand, is of mixed characteristics, and varies according to speech rate, dialect, and the gender of the speaker, but generally possessing a lighter reduction of unstressed vowels, less raising of pre-stress vowels, less devoicing and fewer deletions. At fast speech rates, Brazilian Portuguese is more stress-timed, while in slow speech rates, it can be more syllable-timed. The accents of rural, southern Rio Grande do Sul and the Northeast are considered to sound more syllable-timed than the others, while the southeastern dialects such as the mineiro, in central Minas Gerais, the paulistano, of the northern coast and eastern regions of São Paulo, and the fluminense, along Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and eastern Minas Gerais as well the Federal District, are most frequently essentially stress-timed. Also, male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese speak faster than female speakers and speak in a more stress-timed manner.
Brazilian Portuguese disallows some closed syllables: coda nasals are deleted with concomitant nasalization of the preceding vowel, even in learned words; coda becomes, except for conservative velarization at the extreme south and rhotacism in remote rural areas in the center of the country; the coda rhotic is usually deleted entirely when word-final, especially in verbs in the infinitive form; and /i/ can be epenthesized after almost all other coda-final consonants. This tends to produce words almost entirely composed of open syllables, e.g., magma. In European Portuguese, similarly, epenthesis may occur with , as in magma and afta.
For more detailed information on regional accents, see Portuguese dialects, and for historical sound changes see.
Consonants
The consonant inventory of Portuguese is fairly conservative. The medieval Galician-Portuguese system of seven sibilants is still distinguished in spelling, but is reduced to the four fricatives by the merger of into and apicoalveolar into either or , except in parts of northern Portugal. These changes are known as deaffrication. Other than this, there have been no other significant changes to the consonant phonemes since Old Portuguese. However, several consonant phonemes have special allophones at syllable boundaries, and a few also undergo allophonic changes at word boundaries. Henceforward, the phrase "at the end of a syllable" can be understood as referring to a position before a consonant or at the end of a word.Phonetic notes
- Semivowels contrast with unstressed high vowels in verbal conjugation, as in rio 'I laugh' and riu 'he laughed.' Phonologists discuss whether their nature is vowel or consonant. In intervocalic position semivowels are ambisyllabic, they are associated to both the previous syllable and the following syllable onset.
- In some of Brazil and Angola, the consonant hereafter denoted as is realized as a nasal palatal approximant, which nasalizes the vowel that precedes it: ninho 'nest'.
- is often the pronunciation of a sequence of followed by in a rising diphthong in Brazil, forming a minimal pair between sonha and Sônia ; menina, "girl".
- is often the pronunciation of a sequence of followed by in a rising diphthong in Brazil; e.g. limão, "lemon" ; sandália, "sandal".
- The consonant hereafter denoted as has a variety of realizations depending on dialect. In Europe, it is typically a uvular trill ; however, a pronunciation as a voiced uvular fricative may be becoming dominant in urban areas. There is also a realization as a voiceless uvular fricative, and the original pronunciation as an alveolar trill also remains very common in various dialects. A common realization of the word-initial in the Lisbon accent is a voiced uvular fricative trill. In Brazil, can be velar, uvular, or glottal and may be voiceless unless between voiced sounds; it is usually pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative, a voiceless glottal fricative or voiceless uvular fricative. See also Guttural R in Portuguese.
- and are normally, as in English. However, a number of dialects in northern Portugal pronounce and as apico-alveolar sibilants, as in the Romance languages of northern Iberia. A very few northeastern Portugal dialects still maintain the medieval distinction between apical and laminal sibilants.
- As phonemes, and occur only in loanwords, with a tendency for speakers to substitute into fricatives in Portugal. However, and are allophones of and before front high vowels and in most Brazilian dialects.
- In northern and central Portugal, the voiced stops,, are usually lenited to fricatives,, and respectively, except at the beginning of words, or after nasal vowels; a similar process occurs in Spanish.
- In large parts of northern Portugal, e.g. Trás-os-Montes, and are merged, both pronounced, as in Spanish.
Consonant elision
Consonant phonotactics
Syllables have the maximal structure of V. The only possible codas in European Portuguese are, and and in Brazilian Portuguese and.- The consonants and only occur in the middle of a word between vowels, and only rarely occur before.
- Although nasal consonants do not normally occur at the end of syllables, syllable-final may be present in rare learned words, such as abdómen. In Brazilian varieties, these words have a nasal diphthong. Word-initial occurs in very few loanwords.
- While the sibilant consonants contrast word-initially and intervocalically, they appear in complementary distribution in the syllable coda. For many dialects, the sibilant is a postalveolar in coda position. In many other dialects of Brazil, the postalveolar variant occurs in some or all cases when directly preceding a consonant, including across word boundaries, but not word-finally. In a number of Brazilian dialects, this "palatalization" is absent entirely. Voicing contrast is also neutralized, with or occurring before voiced consonants and or appearing before voiceless consonants and before a pause. In European dialects, the postalveolar fricatives are only weakly fricated in the syllable coda.
- The consonant is velarized in the syllable coda in European and most of African dialects. In most Brazilian dialects, is vocalized to at the end of syllables, but in the dialects of the extreme south, mainly along the frontiers with other countries, it has the full pronunciation or the velarized pronunciation. In some caipira registers, there is a rhotacism of coda to retroflex. In casual BP, unstressed il can be realized as, as in fácil .
- For speakers who realize as an alveolar trill, the sequence can coalesce into a voiced alveolar fricative trill.
- proposes that Portuguese possesses labio-velar stops and as additional phonemes rather than sequences of a velar stop and.
- The semivowels and do not occur before and respectively, and only contrast in some diphthongs like in pai versus pau. Otherwise they are the non-syllabic allophones of and in unstressed syllables.
- Unlike its neighbor and relative Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese lacks a tendency to elide any stop, including those that may become a continuant by lenition, but it has a number of allophones to it.
- In most Brazilian dialects, including the overwhelming majority of the registers of Rio de Janeiro, other fluminense-speaking areas, and São Paulo, as well some rural areas of Portugal, the dental stops are affricated to and before,. Post-alveolar affricates also appear in loanwords from languages such as English, Spanish, and Japanese.
Rhotics
- Word-initially ;
- Syllable-initially preceded by or ;
- Following a nasal vowel ;
- In most Brazilian and some African dialects, syllable-finally ;
- When written with the digraph "rr".
The realization of the "hard" rhotic varies significantly across dialects.
This restricted variation has prompted several authors to postulate a single rhotic phoneme. and see the soft as the unmarked realization and that instances of intervocalic result from gemination and a subsequent deletion rule. Similarly, argue that the hard is the unmarked realization.
Brazilian rhotics
In addition to the phonemic variation between and between vowels, up to four allophones of the "merged" phoneme /R/ are found in other positions:- A "soft" allophone in syllable-onset clusters, as described above;
- A default "hard" allophone in most other circumstances;
- In some dialects, a special allophone syllable-finally ;
- Commonly in all dialects, deletion of the rhotic word-finally.
The syllable-final allophone shows the greatest variation:
- Many dialects use the same voiceless fricative as in the default allophone. This may become voiced before a voiced consonant, esp. in its weaker variants.
- The soft occurs for many speakers in Southern Brazil and São Paulo city.
- An English-like approximant or vowel occurs elsewhere in São Paulo as well as Mato Grosso do Sul, southern Goiás, central and southern Mato Grosso and bordering regions of Minas Gerais. This pronunciation is stereotypically associated with the rural "caipira" dialect.
The soft realization is often maintained across word boundaries in close syntactic contexts.
Vowels
Portuguese has one of the richest vowel phonologies of all Romance languages, having both oral and nasal vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs. A phonemic distinction is made between close-mid vowels and the open-mid vowels, as in Italian, Catalan and French, though there is a certain amount of vowel alternation. European Portuguese has also two central vowels, one of which tends to be elided like the e caduc of French.The central closed vowel only occurs in European Portuguese when e is unstressed, e.g. presidente ; as well as in Angola, but it only occurs at last syllables, e.g. presidente. However, does not exist in Brazil, e.g. presidente.
In Angola, and merge to, and appears only in final syllables rama. The nasal becomes open.
Vowel classificationPortuguese uses vowel height to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables; the vowels tend to be raised to when they are unstressed. The dialects of Portugal are characterized by reducing vowels to a greater extent than others. Falling diphthongs are composed of a vowel followed by one of the high vowels or ; although rising diphthongs occur in the language as well, they can be interpreted as hiatuses.European Portuguese possesses quite a wide range of vowel allophones:
According to Mateus and d'Andrade, in European Portuguese, the stressed only occurs in the following three contexts:
European Portuguese "e caduc"European Portuguese possesses a near-close near-back unrounded vowel. It occurs in unstressed syllables such as in pegar . There is no standard symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this sound. The IPA Handbook transcribes it as, but in Portuguese studies is traditionally used.
Oral diphthongsDiphthongs are not considered independent phonemes in Portuguese, but knowing them can help with spelling and pronunciation.
There are also some words with two vowels occurring next to each other like in iate and sábio may be pronounced both as rising diphthongs or hiatus. In these and other cases, other diphthongs, diphthong-hiatus or hiatus-diphthong combinations might exist depending on speaker, such as or even for suo and or even for fatie. and are non-syllabic counterparts of the vowels and, respectively. At least in European Portuguese, the diphthongs tend to have more central second elements – note that the latter semivowel is also more weakly rounded than the vowel. In the Lisbon accent, the diphthong often has an onset that is more back than central, i.e. or even. Nasal vowelsPortuguese also has a series of nasalized vowels. analyzes European Portuguese with five monophthongs and four diphthongs, all phonemic:. Nasal diphthongs occur mostly at the end of words, and in a few compounds. Brazilian Portuguese is overall than European Portuguese due to many external influences including the common language spoken at Brazil's coast at time of discovery, Tupi.As in French, the nasal consonants represented by the letters ⟨m n⟩ are deleted in coda position, and in that case the preceding vowel becomes phonemically nasal, e.g. in genro . But a nasal consonant subsists when it is followed by a plosive, e.g. in cantar . Vowel nasalization has also been observed non-phonemically as result of coarticulation, before heterosyllabic nasal consonants, e.g. in soma . Hence, one speaks discriminatingly of nasal vowels and nasalized vowels. Additionally, a nasal monophthong written ⟨ã⟩ exists independently of these processes, e.g. in romã . The /e-ɛ/ and /o-ɔ/ distinction does not happen in nasal vowels; ⟨em om⟩ are pronounced as close-mid. In BP, the vowel is sometimes phonemically raised to when it is nasal, and also in stressed syllables before heterosyllabic nasal consonants : compare for instance dama sã or and dá maçã or . may also be raised slightly in word-final unstressed syllables. Nasalization and height increase noticeably with time during the production of a single nasal vowel in BP in those cases that are written with nasal consonants ⟨m n⟩, so that may be realized as or. This creates a significant difference between the realizations of ⟨am⟩ and ⟨ã⟩ for some speakers: compare for instance ranço real or and rã surreal or . At the end of a word ⟨em⟩ is always pronounced with a clear nasal palatal approximant. Whenever a nasal vowel is pronounced with a nasal coda the nasalization of the vowel itself is optional. The following examples exhaustively demonstrate the general situation for BP.
Vowel nasalization in some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese is very different from that of French, for example. In French, the nasalization extends uniformly through the entire vowel, whereas in the Southern-Southeastern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, the nasalization begins almost imperceptibly and then becomes stronger toward the end of the vowel. In this respect it is more similar to the nasalization of Hindi-Urdu. In some cases, the nasal archiphoneme even entails the insertion of a nasal consonant such as , as in the following examples:
Vowel alternationThe stressed relatively open vowels contrast with the stressed relatively close vowels in several kinds of grammatically meaningful alternation:
There are several minimal pairs in which a clitic containing the vowel contrasts with a monosyllabic stressed word containing : da vs. dá, mas vs. más, a vs. à, etc. In BP, however, these words may be pronounced with in some environments. Unstressed vowelsSome isolated vowels tend to change quality in a fairly predictable way when they become unstressed. In the examples [|below], the stressed syllable of each word is in boldface. The term "final" should be interpreted here as at the end of a word or before word-final -s.* N.E.: The bold syllable is the stressed, but the pronunciation indicated on the left is for the unstressed syllable – not bold. With a few exceptions mentioned in the previous sections, the vowels and occur in complementary distribution when stressed, the latter before nasal consonants followed by a vowel, and the former elsewhere. In Brazilian Portuguese, the general pattern in the southern and western accents is that the stressed vowels,, neutralize to,,, respectively, in unstressed syllables, as is common in Romance languages. In final unstressed syllables, however, they are raised to,,. In casual BP, unstressed and may be raised to, on any unstressed syllable, as long as it has no coda. However, in North-Eastern Brazilian dialects, non-final unstressed vowels are open-mid,,. European Portuguese has taken this process one step further, raising,, to,, in all unstressed syllables. The vowels and are also more centralized than their Brazilian counterparts. The three unstressed vowels are reduced and often voiceless or elided in fast speech. If is elided, which mostly it is in the beginning of a word and word finally, the previous consonant becomes aspirated like in ponte , or if it is is labializes the previous consonant like in grosso . However, Angolan Portuguese has been more conservative, raising,, to,, in unstressed syllables; and to,, in final unstressed syllables. Which makes it almost similar to Brazilian Portuguese. There are some exceptions to the rules above. For example, occurs instead of unstressed or, word-initially or before another vowel in hiatus. is often deleted entirely word-initially in the combination becoming. Also,, or appear in some unstressed syllables in EP, being marked in the lexicon, like espetáculo ; these occur from deletion of the final consonant in a closed syllable and from crasis. And there is some dialectal variation in the unstressed sounds: the northern and eastern accents of BP have low vowels in unstressed syllables,, instead of the high vowels. However, the Brazilian media tends to prefer the southern pronunciation. In any event, the general paradigm is a useful guide for pronunciation and spelling. Nasal vowels, vowels that belong to falling diphthongs, and the high vowels and are not affected by this process, nor is the vowel when written as the digraph . Nevertheless, casual BP may raise unstressed nasal vowels, to,, too. EpenthesisIn BP, an epenthetic vowel is sometimes inserted between consonants, to break up consonant clusters that are not native to Portuguese, in learned words and in borrowings. This also happens at the ends of words after consonants that cannot occur word-finally. For example, psicologia may be pronounced ; adverso may be pronounced ; McDonald's may be pronounced. In northern Portugal, an epenthetic may be used instead,,, but in southern Portugal there is often no epenthesis,,. Epenthesis at the end of a word does not normally occur in Portugal.The native Portuguese consonant clusters, where there is not epenthesis, are sequences of a non-sibilant oral consonant followed by the liquids or, and the complex consonants. Some examples: Further notes on the oral vowels
Consonant sandhiAs was mentioned above, the dialects of Portuguese can be divided into two groups, according to whether syllable-final sibilants are pronounced as postalveolar consonants, or as alveolar,. At the end of words, the default pronunciation for a sibilant is voiceless,, but in connected speech the sibilant is treated as though it were within a word :
StressPrimary stress may fall on any of the three final syllables of a word, but mostly on the last two. There is a partial correlation between the position of the stress and the final vowel; for example, the final syllable is usually stressed when it contains a nasal phoneme, a diphthong, or a close vowel. The orthography of Portuguese takes advantage of this correlation to minimize the number of diacritics.Because of the phonetic changes that often affect unstressed vowels, pure lexical stress is less common in Portuguese than in related languages, but there is still a significant number of examples of it: Prosodyis not lexically significant in Portuguese, but phrase- and sentence-level tones are important. As in most Romance languages, interrogation on yes-no questions is expressed mainly by sharply raising the tone at the end of the sentence. An exception to this is the word oi that is subject to meaning changes: an exclamation tone means 'hi/hello', and in an interrogative tone it means 'I didn't understand'.Phonological comparisonTableSampleOs Lusíadas, Luís de Camões
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