There are countries where the official languages are not understood by some (that uses a dialect, normally a subaltern language not recognized by the state as one), or they are dialects of the same language but others do not understand them. That is rare in Portuguese dialects, especially nowadays. A Portuguese speaker from Angola perfectly understands a speaker from northern Brazil or middle Portugal.

Portugal presents the wider variety of dialects in the Portuguese language. Although the country is very small, a city or village can have its own particular dialect. The Nortenho dialect in Portugal presents many regional words only used by them and the dialect (and neighbouring dialects) has (possibly) unique features not found in other Portuguese dialects. But because they are intelligible, even when using local words, Portuguese speakers do not understand what they speak as dialects, they use instead the word sotaque (Eng. accent) to describe it; some linguistics agrees and names it as falares (Eng. ways of speaking).

In here, we will understand dialect has a regional variation of a language, with many differences due to geographical location. These differences are easily understood by the speakers, and thus identifying the origin region of the speaker is easy. Sometimes even cities or villages can be easily be identified by the dialect.

Varieties of Portuguese

A dialect can also be selected to be a variety of the language, due to prestige, culture or socio-economical factors. There are two officially used dialects in the Portuguese language. The one of Rio de Janeiro (and, in some manner, São Paulo) for Brazil and of Lisbon and Coimbra for Portugal, Portuguese speaking African countries and East Timor, due to politics the two varieties are somewhat written differently, but that difference is similar to what happens in English. These differences are to be eliminated because Brazil and Portugal have made an orthographic agreement. Because the African countries are involved and did not yet approved, it is not yet in force, thought Brazil has made some pressure, with the support of Portugal, in the African countries to approve the agreement.

Spoken varieties of Portuguese

• European and African Portuguese
• Brazilian Portuguese
• São Tomean Portuguese
• Galician Portuguese (considered by philologists)

note: In fact, Galician is a co-dialect of Portuguese. It has many differences not observed in other varieties due to Spanish influence. Considering it has a same language is very accepted (when not dealing with nationalisms), but not by political or sociologic factors.

Written varieties of Portuguese

• European and African Portuguese
• Brazilian Portuguese

Differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese