How Much Energy Will It Take to Make Portuguese Go

How Much Energy Will It Take to Make Portuguese Go Global?

On December 15, 2009, I was invited to participate in a radio interview with the Voice of America. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was ending, and once again, as has been the case throughout the 2000s, Brazil was up front as a major protagonist. The country’s global influence repeatedly has been manifested in the international community, such as the firm position it took in opposing Honduran President Zelaya’s ouster and its command of the military component of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Given the mounting evidence of Brazil’s powerful thrust in world affairs, the Voice interviewer was curious whether all of this bustle would translate into the emergence of the Portuguese language as among the more widely spoken of foreign languages.

At the time, I considered that an interesting question, and perhaps even more so now. I believe this is especially so if a distinction must be made between a language that has a great number of native speakers using it and one that also a great number of non-native speakers committed to learning it. With around 230 million speakers worldwide, Portuguese is among the ten most spoken languages in the world. Brazilians, however, account for 190 million (83%) of these; most of the remaining speakers are from historically Portuguese-speaking nations such as Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe. On the other hand, very few people in other countries are regularly studying Portuguese as a second language. That means that although one can conclude that the Portuguese language has a great number of native speakers, it is not a language that many non-native speakers are rushing to learn.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Thomaz Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers."

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