Brazilian Portuguese sounds different than Portuguese in PT; I like the sound of Brazilian. To me Portuguese from PT sounds more like something from eastern europa. Matter of taste ofcourse but I have heard that statement a lot from clients since we have offices in PT.
For years I've been wondering why Continental Portuguese sounds like an Eastern European language. Sometimes I overhear people speaking some Eastern European language and my first impression is that they are speaking Portuguese, but then I realize I can't understand what they're saying (I'm a native Portuguese speaker).
Being Brazilian, Continental Portuguese sounds awful to me. But then I've heard many Portuguese people saying that Brazilian Portuguese sounds awful to them :)
This happened after 1974 when the country had lost the decade-long proxy war against USA and URSS. As price to pay, the territories outside Europe were turned by the winning party into independent nations.
What was left of Portugal (European-side) was now a small land with difficulty to defend its independence from the neighbor Spain that would now be hostile to communist regimes, besides historically aiming to get the whole of Iberia under a single government.
The new government installed in continental Portugal was initially populated by the URSS cronies (Alvaro Cunhal & co.) who quickly realized that military power wouldn't be readily available to protect their sovereignty and grip in power. However, their own party (PCP) was familiar with resistance (they had survived for decades in such manner) and at that time, Portuguese was closer to the Brazilian Portuguese and easy for Spanish people to understand, which they saw as a flaw.
So they made arrangements for Russian teachers to modify the language taught in schools, alongside with government intervention in media (newspapers, radio, tv, events) to gradually modify spoken Portuguese to end with the (now famous) "chh" that you hear so often. Kids would learn this new variant straight in primary schools.
In case of invasion from Spain, the language would ensure resistance and a painful/slow path to complete assimilation in forthcoming years. Fortunately, URSS failed as a project, communism quickly failed in Portugal after economy went bankrupt, twice. Portugal and Spain joined together EU in mid 80's, both governments resumed working together as happening before 74 but the language modifications were a true success.
The population didn't realized this had happened until it was already so different from other nations that use Portuguese.
Portuguese aged today between 30 to 45 in mainland will be surprised with the ease how they can pronounce Russian correctly. Ironically, Brazilian Portuguese is truer to the original Portuguese than what you find in Portugal today.
Source:
- not on the Internet, not in English language, not likely in public docs
Eu também gostava de ver este tipo de coisas publicadas. Infelizmente lá teremos de esperar mais algumas décadas com o povo tuga a pensar que o seu sotaque mudou da noite para dia por "magia".. ^_^
