Do you know the name of the dialect that is considered a romance language that developed from the Latin-Galician language that was the spoken tongue in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia? If you guessed Portuguese, then you are correct. In fact, the Portuguese language also took in influences from the Arabic languages spoken in areas that were vanquished by the Portuguese reconquista.
And the spread of the Portuguese language became almost complete during the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal became aggressive in trying to establish a colonial empire that affected countries such as Brazil in South America, Goa and other parts of India, Macau in China, Timor in Southeast Asia and the five African countries namely Mozambique, Angola, Sao Tome e Principe, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde.
And for almost three hundred fifty years, the Portuguese language was the lingua franca on the island of Sri Lanka. And at that same era, some offshoots of the Portuguese language showed up in different parts of the world such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia.
Today, Portuguese is the fifth most spoken language in the world, the most widely spoken in the southern hemisphere, and the third most spoken in the western world backed by more than two hundred sixty million individual speakers. It has an official status in the European Union, Mercosur, the African Union, and the Organization of American States, the Latin Union, and the National Olympic Committees of Portuguese Official Language.
And just like any other popular dialect, the Portuguese language had its own historical evolution, influenced by many cultures and countries until it finally reached what it is today. In fact, contemporary Portuguese has a number of sub-dialects many of them totally distinct from each other, and two major and internationally recognized standards – the European Portuguese and the Brazilian Portuguese. Today, it is the language spoken by half of the South American populace and is the official language in nine countries.
It would be very interesting to learn this historic language and it currently is the fourth most learned language in the world with at the very least thirty million students studying the language. If you want to learn Portuguese, there are a lot of online tutorials that will offer a range and quality of audio language courses which are at par with the actual schoolroom learning setup.
There are also audio samples of the Portuguese language courses which can significantly help you learn conversational Portuguese and then you can begin to learn the basic Portuguese language afterwards and it would turn out easier.