• @CanadaPlus
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    23 days ago

    So I guess you can tell when someone’s European Portuguese in writing?

    • Daemon Silverstein
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      2 days ago

      Probably. For example: European Portuguese often uses “está a fazer” / “estás a fazer”, Brazilian Portuguese often uses the gerund form (“está fazendo”). Also, there are slight differences on how some words are written: Brazilian Portuguese uses “objetivo” (objective/target), “ação” (action), “tela” (screen), “mouse de computador” (computer mouse), while European Portuguese respectively uses “objectivo”, “acção”, “ecrã” and “rato de computador”.

      However, I once heard that a “Brazilianization” of European Portuguese is happening through the European Portuguese youth due to how major online Portuguese-speaking influencers are often Brazilian, such as Lucas Neto (an infuencer whose content focuses on the youth). Considering that the youth people has more online presence than older people, chances are that the variations of Brazilian Portuguese (especially the “Carioca” variation, as those Brazilian influencers often come from Rio de Janeiro’s city) is overriding European Portuguese among the European Portuguese people all over the the web. This makes it slightly hard to identify the nationality solely from written text.

      (Edit: “Brazilianization” is different from “Brazilification”. The latter refers to ethnic diversification, while the former refers to “An increase in the percentage of Brazilian people or cultural elements in an area or industry” (to paraphrase Wiktionary). Although the ethnic diversification is also indeed happening across the world, the focus of my reply is the cultural and linguistic realm, so “Brazilianization” seems to fit better.)