With a population of over million, [ 1 ] Brazil is by far the world's largest Portuguese-speaking nation and the only one in the Americas. Brazilian Portuguese differs, particularly in phonology and prosody , from varieties spoken in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries.
In these latter countries, the language tends to have a closer connection to contemporary European Portuguese, partly because Portuguese colonial rule ended much more recently there than in Brazil, and partly due to the heavy indigenous and diasporic African influence on Brazilian Portuguese. However, due to the two reasons mentioned above, the gap between the written, formal language and the spoken language is much wider in Brazilian Portuguese than in European Portuguese.
In , the Community of Portuguese Language Countries CPLP , which included representatives from all countries with Portuguese as the official language, reached an agreement on the reform of the Portuguese orthography to unify the two standards then in use by Brazil on one side and the remaining Portuguese-speaking countries on the other.
This spelling reform went into effect in Brazil on 1 January In Portugal, the reform was signed into law by the President on 21 July allowing for a six-year adaptation period, during which both orthographies co-existed.
All of the CPLP countries have signed the reform. In Brazil, this reform has been in force since January Portugal and other Portuguese-speaking countries have since begun using the new orthography. Regional varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, while remaining mutually intelligible , may diverge from each other in matters such as vowel pronunciation and speech intonation. The existence of Portuguese in Brazil is a legacy of the Portuguese colonization of the Americas. The first wave of Portuguese-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil in the 16th century, but the language was not widely used then.
