The current Orthographic Agreement for the Portuguese Language was definitively approved on October 12, 1990 and signed on December 16 of the same year.
The document was signed by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Letters and representatives from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.
The delegation of observers from Galicia also joined. This is because in Galicia, a region located in northern Spain, the spoken language is Galician, the mother tongue of Portuguese.
Deadline for Implementation in Brazil
In Brazil, the implementation of the new agreement started in 2008. The deadline for membership is December 31, 2015, according to Decree 7875/2012.
This is also the deadline in Portugal, but not all countries will unify at the same time. Cape Verde, for example, will only be fully adapted to the new agreement in 2019.
Until then, public examinations, school tests and official government publications will be adapted to the rules. The implementation in Brazilian textbooks began in 2009.
The aim of the agreement is to unify the official spelling and reduce the cultural and political weight generated by the two forms of official writing in the same language. The idea is to increase the international prestige and diffusion of Portuguese.
Previous Spelling Agreements
The differences in the spelling of the language used by Brazil and Portugal began in 1911, when the Portuguese country underwent its first orthographic reform. The reformulation was not extended to Brazil.
The first attempts to minimize the issue took place in 1931. At that time, representatives of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Lisbon Academy of Sciences began to discuss the unification of the two orthographic systems. This only took place in 1943, but without success.
Representatives of both countries returned to discuss the matter again in 1943, when the Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Convention took place.
Like the first, this one also did not have the desired effect and only Portugal adhered to the new rules.
A new attempt brought the representatives back together. This time, in 1975, when Portugal did not accept the imposition of new orthographic rules.
It was only in 1986 that scholars from both countries returned to touch on the orthographic reform, having, for the first time, representatives from other countries of the Portuguese-speaking community.
At the time, it was identified that among the main reasons for the failure of previous negotiations was the drastic simplification of the language.
The main criticism was in the suppression of differential accents in the words proparoxytone and paroxytone, an action rejected by the Portuguese community.
Brazilians, on the other hand, disagreed with the restoration of muted consonants, which had been abolished for some time.
Another point rejected by Brazilian public opinion was the accentuation of stressed vowels "e" and "o" when followed by nasal consonants "m" and "n". This rule was valid for proparoxytone words with an acute accent and not the circumflex.
They would be like that in the case of Antônio (António), comfortable (comfortable) and gender (gender).
Thus, in addition to spelling, scholars also began to consider the pronunciation of words.
Considering the specificities of the signatory countries of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement, it was agreed to unify 98% of the words.
Main Changes
Consonants C, P, B, G, M and T
In this case, the specifics of the pronunciation according to the geographic space are considered. In other words, the spelling is kept when there is pronunciation, it is removed when they are not pronounced.
The maintenance of unspoken consonants occurred mainly by speakers of Portugal, which Brazil had long adapted the spelling.
There were also cases of maintenance of double spelling, also respecting pronunciation.
It was decided that in these cases, the Portuguese language dictionaries will register both forms in all cases of double spelling. This fact will be clarified to point out the geographic differences that impose the oscillation of the pronunciation.
Examples of pronounced consonants:
Compact, fiction, pact, adept, aptitude, nuptials, etc.
Examples of unspoken consonants:
Action, affective, direction, adoption, exact, optimal, etc.
Examples of double spelling:
Subject and subject, subtle and subtle, amygdala and amygdala, amnesty and amnesty, etc.
Graphic accentuation
Graphic accents no longer exist in certain oxytone and paroxytone words.
Examples:
For – in bending to stop
Fur - substantive
Pear - substantive
Paroxytones with diphthongs "hey" and "hi" in the stressed syllable.
Examples:
Assembly, ride, idea.
The accent on paroxytone words with double vowels also drops. This happened because in paroxytone words the same pronunciation occurs in all Portuguese-speaking countries.
Examples:
bless – bending to bless
nausea – seasick bending
people – flexion of populating
Flight – flexion of flying
Read too:
- Graphic accentuation
- Graphic Accenting Exercises
- Acute Accent
- Circumflex accent
- Lexical Notations
Hyphen Use
The hyphen is used in cases of words in which the second formation begins with the letter "h". The same is true when the first formation starts with a letter equal to the one that ends the prefix.
Examples:
Unhygienic, Rear Admiral, Microwave, Hyper-resistant.
tooéemployee the hyphen when the prefix ends in "m" and the second element of the word starts with a vowel.
Example:
pan-african
O hyphen is not used:
In the case of "r" and "s" consonants doubled in "rr" and "ss":
Examples:
Ecosystem, microsystem, anti-religious
the hyphen too no is used in cases where the prefix ends in a vowel and the suffix begins with a different vowel.
Examples:
Anti-aircraft, aerospace
shake
The use of the umlaut (¨) was abolished.
Example:
sausage - sausage
The alphabet
The alphabet of the Portuguese language now has 26 letters, in its upper and lower case. The letters K, Y and W are incorporated. So, then, is the alphabet:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.
According to the rules of the Orthographic Agreement, in addition to the 26 letters of the alphabet, the following are also used in the constitution of the words:
- o (you cedilla)
- the digraphs: rr (double miss), ss (this double), ch (yo - yo), lh (he -aga), huh (yo - yo), gu (you -u) and that (what -u).
read more:
- Sunset, Sunset or Sunset
- Orthography
- Use of Ç - cedilla
- Digraph
- Vocal Encounters
- Consonant Meetings
- Uppercase and lowercase letters