Portuñol or Portunhol ( ) is a portmanteau of the words Português/Portugués ("Portuguese") and Español/Espanhol ("Spanish"). It refers to various types of language contact between Spanish and Portuguese which have occurred in regions where the two languages coexist, like the border regions between Brazil, whose official language is Portuguese, and most of its neighboring countries, whose official language is Spanish. These range from improvised code-switching between monolingual speakers of each language to more or less stable mixed languages.

As code-switching

It is the name often given to any unsystematic mixture of Portuguese with Spanish (code-switching). This is sometimes used by speakers of the two languages to talk to each other. It is possible to conduct a moderately fluent conversation in this way because Portuguese and Spanish are closely related Latin languages.

As a language variety

Portuñol Riverense

It also refers to a Portuguese spoken in the border between Uruguay and Brazil, notably in the region of the twin cities of Rivera and Santana do Livramento, where the border is open and a street is the only line dividing the two countries. This condition, over hundreds of years, gave rise to this variety, influenced by Spanish and the Portuguese used on radio and television, which their speakers call portuñol/portunhol, brazilero, bayano or fronterizo/fronteiriço. It has been studied extensively by linguists, including Ana Maria Carvalho and John Lipski.

Bibliography

External links

• Page on Portunhol at Unicamp - University of Campinas, São Paulo
• Carvalho, Ana Maria. Variation and diffusion of Uruguayan Portuguese in a bilingual border town, by Ana Maria Carvalho, University of California at Berkeley USA. (PDF)
• Adolfo Elizaincín website

See also

• Barranquenho
• Code-switching
• Differences between Spanish and Portuguese
• Llanito
• Porglish
• Portuguese dialects
• Spanglish