Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990

**Written varieties**
Portuguese speaking countries except Brazil before the 1990 agreement	Brazil before the 1990 agreement	All countries after the 1990 agreement	translation
Different pronunciation
anónimo	anônimo	Both forms remain	anonymous
Vénus	Vênus	Both forms remain	Venus
facto	fato	Both forms remain	fact
ideia	idéia	ideia	idea
Silent consonants
acção	ação	ação	action
direcção	direção	direção	direction
eléctrico	elétrico	elétrico	electric
óptimo	ótimo	ótimo	very good
Diacritics
pinguim	pingüim	pinguim	penguin
voo	vôo	voo	flight
Non-personal and non-geographical names
Janeiro	janeiro	janeiro	January

The Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 (Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

: Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990) is an international treaty whose purpose is to create a unified orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language

Official language

An official language is a language that is given a special legal status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically a nation's official language will be the one used in that nation's courts, parliament and administration. However, official status can also be used to give a...

. It was signed in Lisbon

Lisbon

Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...

, on December 16, 1990, at the end of a negotiation, begun in 1980, between the Lisbon Science Academy and the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The signatories included official representatives from all of the Portuguese-language countries except East Timor

East Timor

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor , is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor...

, which was under Indonesian occupation at the time, but later adhered to the Agreement, in 2004.

Galicia was invited to take part in the reform but the Galician government ignored the invitation, since it regards Galician

Galician language

Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...

and Portuguese as different languages. However, an unofficial commission formed by Galician linguists who support the unity of the language attended the meetings as observers.

Intentions

The Orthographic Agreement of 1990 intends to establish a single official orthography for the Portuguese language and thus to improve its international status, putting an end to the existence of two official orthographic norms: one in Brazil and another in the remaining Portuguese-speaking countries. Proposers of the Agreement give the Spanish language

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

as a motivating example: Spanish has many variations, between Spain and Hispanic America

Hispanic America

Hispanic America or Spanish America is the region comprising the American countries inhabited by Spanish-speaking populations.These countries have significant commonalities with each other and with Spain, whose colonies they formerly were...

, both in pronunciation and in vocabulary, but it is under the same spelling norm, regulated by the Association of Spanish Language Academies

Association of Spanish Language Academies

The Association of Spanish Language Academies is the entity which regulates the Spanish language. It was created in Mexico in 1951 and represents the union of all the separate academies in the Spanish-speaking world....

.

The contents and the legal

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

value of the treaty have not achieved a consensus among linguists

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, philologists

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

, scholars

Scholarly method

Scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public.-Methods:...

, journalists

Journalism

Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

, writers

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, translators

Translation

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...

and figures of the arts, politics and business of the Brazilian and Portuguese societies. Therefore, its application has been the object of disagreements for linguistic, political, economic

Economy

An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...

and legal reasons. There are even some who claim the unconstitutionality

Constitutional law

Constitutional law is the body of law which defines the relationship of different entities within a state, namely, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary....

of the treaty. Some others claim that the Orthographic Agreement serves chiefly geopolitical

Geopolitics

Geopolitics, from Greek Γη and Πολιτική in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale....

and economic interests of Brazil.

Precedents

Until the beginning of the 20th century, in Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

as in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, an orthography

Orthography

was used that, by rule, relied on Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

or Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

to form words, e.g. pharmacia ("pharmacy"), lyrio ("lily"), and diccionário ("dictionary"), among others.

In 1911, following the establishment of the Portuguese republic

5 October 1910 revolution

The revolution of 1910 was a republican coup d'état that occurred in Portugal on 5 October 1910, which deposed King Manuel II and established the Portuguese First Republic....

, a wide orthographic reform was adopted — the Orthographic Reform of 1911 — which completely modified the face of the written language, bringing it closer to contemporary trends. However, this reform was made without any agreement with Brazil, leaving both countries with two entirely different orthographies: Portugal with its reformed orthography, Brazil with its traditional orthography (called pseudo-etimológica, "pseudo-etymological").

As time passed, the Science Academy of Lisbon and the Brazilian Academy of Letters

Academia Brasileira de Letras

Academia Brasileira de Letras is a Brazilian literary non-profit society established at the end of the 19th century by a group of 40 writers and poets inspired by the Académie Française. The first president, Machado de Assis, declared its foundation on December 15, 1896, with the statutes being...

led successive attempts to establish a common spelling between both countries. In 1931, the first agreement was reached, however, as vocabularies published in 1940 (in Portugal) and in 1943 (in Brazil) continued to contain some divergences, a new meeting was held that created the Orthographic Agreement of 1945. This agreement became law in Portugal, by Decree 35.288/45. In Brazil, the Agreement of 1945 was approved by Decree-Law 8.286/45, but it was never ratified by the National Congress

National Congress of Brazil

The National Congress of Brazil is the legislative body of Brazil's federal government.Unlike regional legislative bodies – Legislative Assemblies and City Councils -, the Congress is bicameral, composed of the Federal Senate and the Chamber of Deputies .The Senate represents the 26 states and...

and was repealed by Law 2.623/55, leaving Brazilians with the rules of the 1945 agreement.

A new agreement between Portugal and Brazil — effective in 1971 in Brazil and in 1973 in Portugal — brought the orthographies slightly closer, removing the written accents responsible for 70% of the divergences between the two official systems and those that marked the unstressed syllable in words derived with the suffix -mente or beginning with -z-, e.g. sòmente (somente, "only"), sòzinho (sozinho, "alone"). Other attempts failed in 1975 — in part due to the period of political upheaval in Portugal, the Revolutionary Process in Progress (PREC) — and in 1986 — due to the reaction elicited in both countries by the suppression of written accents in paroxytone

Paroxytone

Paroxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the penultimate syllable, that is, the syllable before the last syllable, e.g, the English word potato...

words.

However, according to proponents of reform, the fact that the persistence of two orthographies in the Portuguese language

Portuguese language

— the Luso-African and the Brazilian — impedes the trans-Atlantic unity of Portuguese and diminishes its prestige in the world — was expressed by the "Preliminary Basis for Unified Portuguese Orthography" in 1988, addressing criticisms directed toward at the proposal of 1986 and leading to the Orthographic Agreement of 1990.

Participants

For the development of the agreement, from October 6 to 12, 1990, the following delegations met at the Science Academy of Lisbon:

Angola
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

: Filipe Silvino de Pina Zau
Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

: Antônio Houaiss
Antônio Houaiss
Antônio Houaiss was a Brazilian lexicographer, writer and translator, who served as the Minister of Culture.He was the son of Lebanese immigrants....

and Nélida Piñon
Nélida Piñon
Nélida Piñon is a Brazilian writer born May 3, 1937 in Rio de Janeiro of Spanish immigrants. Her first novel was Guia-Mapa de Gabriel Arcanjo , written in 1961, it concerns a protagonist discussing Christian doctrine with her guardian angel...
Cape Verde
Cape Verde
The Republic of Cape Verde is an island country, spanning an archipelago of 10 islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, 570 kilometres off the coast of Western Africa...

: Gabriel Moacyr Rodrigues and Manuel Veiga
Galicia (observers): António Gil Hernández and José Luís Fontenla
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
The Republic of Guinea-Bissau is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Senegal to the north, and Guinea to the south and east, with the Atlantic Ocean to its west....

: António Soares Lopes Júnior and João Wilson Barbosa
Mozambique
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...

: João Pontífice and Maria Eugénia Cruz
Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

: Américo da Costa Ramalho, Aníbal Pinto de Castro, Fernando Cristóvão, Fernando Roldão Dias Agudo, João Malaca Casteleiro, José Tiago de Oliveira, Luís Lindley Cintra
Luís Lindley Cintra
Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra was a prominent figure in Portuguese philology and linguistics. A prolific writer with over 80 published works, he was a keen student of the historical differentiation during the 14th and 15th centuries between literary Portuguese and Castilian Spanish...

, Manuel Jacinto Nunes, Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira and Vasconcelos Marques
Sao Tome and Principe
São Tomé and Príncipe
São Tomé and Príncipe, officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, is a Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. It consists of two islands: São Tomé and Príncipe, located about apart and about , respectively, off...

: Albertino dos Santos Bragança e João Hermínio Pontífice

In addition to these, in the Preliminary Basis for Unified Portuguese Orthography of 1988, and in the Convention of the Orthographic Unification of Portuguese, formed in the Brazilian Academy of Letters in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

from May 6 to 12, 1986, the following were also present: Maria Luísa Dolbeth e Costa (Angola); Abgar Renault, Adriano da Gama Kury, Austregésilo de Athayde

Austregésilo de Athayde

Austregésilo de Athayde was a writer and journalist born in Caruaru, Pernambuco. His career includes being invited by Assis Chateaubriand to work at a top position at the Diários Associados...

, Celso Cunha, Eduardo Portella

Eduardo Portella

Eduardo Portella is a Brazilian essayist, author, and Professor Emeritus at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He has written thirty books and was President of UNESCO's general conference.-External links:**...

, Francisco de Assis Balthar Peixoto de Vasconcellos e José Olympio Rache de Almeida (Brazil); Corsino Fortes

Corsino Fortes

Corsino António Fortes is a Cape Verdean writer.He participated at the University of Lisbon in 1966.He became an ambassador in Lisbon.-Works:*Pão & Fonema *Árvore & Tombor *Pedras de Sol & Substância ...

(Cape Verde); Paulo Pereira (Guinea-Bissau); Luís Filipe Pereira (Mozambique); Maria de Lourdes Belchior Pontes and Mário Quarin Graça (Portugal).

Agreement and amendment protocols

In Article III, the Orthographic Agreement of 1990 scheduled its taking effect for January 1, 1994, following the ratification of all members. However, as only Portugal (on August 23, 1991), Brazil (on April 18, 1995), and Cape Verde have ratified the document, its complete implementation is pending.

On July 17, 1998, in Praia

Praia

Praia , is the capital and largest city of Cape Verde, an island nation in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal. It lies on the southern coast of Santiago island in the Sotavento Islands group. It is the island's ferry port and is home to one of the nation’s four international airports...

, Cape Verde, an "Amending Protocol for the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement" was signed that retracted the deadline from the original text, although it remained necessary for all signatories to ratify the agreement before it took effect. Once again, only the dignitaries of Brazil

Brazil

, Portugal

Portugal

, and Cape Verde

Cape Verde

The Republic of Cape Verde is an island country, spanning an archipelago of 10 islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, 570 kilometres off the coast of Western Africa...

approved this protocol.

In June 2004, the heads of state and government of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), gathered in Sao Tome and Principe

São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe, officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, is a Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. It consists of two islands: São Tomé and Príncipe, located about apart and about , respectively, off...

, approved a "Second Amending Protocol for the Orthographic Agreement" that, apart from permitting the addition of East Timor

East Timor

, provided that, instead of ratification by all countries, ratification by three members would suffice for it to take effect.

Vasco Graça Moura

Vasco Graça Moura

Vasco Navarro da Graça Moura, OSE is a Portuguese lawyer, writer, translator and politician, son of Francisco José da Graça Moura and wife Maria Teresa Amado da Cunha Seixas Navarro de Castro, of Northern Portugal bourgeoisie.He was a Member of the European Parliament for the Social Democratic...

, writer and former member of the European Parliament

European Parliament

The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...

, the best-known of the agreement's detractors, maintains that the Second Amending Protocol, like any other international convention, only obligates its implementation in each country if it is ratified by all signatories, something that has not yet occurred. In other words, only after all countries ratify the treaty are they obligated to implement the changes domestically after ratification by three members. The rationality of a legal treaty that obliges a country to adopt another treaty if approved by third countries is disputed. This argument of the 2004 ratification's purported illegality was questioned by lawyer and European Parliament member Vital Moreira.

Brazil ratified the Second Amending Protocol in October 2004, as did Cape Verde in April 2005. On November 17, 2006, Sao Tome and Principe ratified the treaty and its amending protocols, fulfilling the provisions of this protocol.

Changes

The adoption of the new orthography will cause changes in the spelling of about 1.6% of the words in the European norm (official also in Africa, Asia and Oceania) and about 0.5% in the Brazilian norm. The table to the right illustrates typical differences between the two orthographies currently in use.

The 1990 orthographic agreement proposes the elimination of the letters c and p from the European/African spelling whenever they are silent, the elimination of the diaeresis mark (ü) from the Brazilian spelling, and the elimination of the acute accent from the diphthongs éi and ói in paroxytone

Paroxytone

Paroxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the penultimate syllable, that is, the syllable before the last syllable, e.g, the English word potato...

words. As for divergent spellings such as anónimo and anônimo, facto and fato, both will be considered legitimate, according to the dialect of the author or person being transcribed. The agreement also establishes some common guidelines for the use of hyphens and capitalization, the former still to be developed and fixed in a common vocabulary.

It will also add three letters, K, W, Y, to the Portuguese alphabet

Portuguese alphabet

The Portuguese alphabet, , consists of the following 23 or 26 Latin letters:In addition, the following characters with diacritics are used: Áá, Ââ, Ãã, Àà, Çç, Éé, Êê, Íí, Óó, Ôô, Õõ, Úú. These are not, however, treated as independent letters in collation, nor do they have entries of their own in...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7405985.stm.

The following table makes a comparison between the two orthographies currently in use, and the former Brazilian orthography:

Former European orthography	Former Brazilian orthography	New orthography (1990 Agreement)
De facto, o português é actualmente a terceira língua europeia mais falada do mundo.	De fato, o português é atualmente a terceira língua européia mais falada do mundo.	De facto/fato, o português é atualmente a terceira língua europeia mais falada do mundo.
Não é preciso ser génio para saber que o aspecto económico pesa muito na projecção internacional de qualquer língua.	Não é preciso ser gênio para saber que o aspecto econômico pesa muito na projeção internacional de qualquer língua.	Não é preciso ser génio/gênio para saber que o aspeto/aspecto económico/econômico pesa muito na projeção internacional de qualquer língua.
Não há nada melhor do que sair sem direcção, rumando para Norte ou para Sul, para passar um fim-de-semana tranquilo em pleno Agosto.	Não há nada melhor do que sair sem direção, rumando para norte ou para sul, para passar um fim de semana tranqüilo em pleno agosto.	Não há nada melhor do que sair sem direção, rumando para norte ou para sul, para passar um fim de semana tranquilo em pleno agosto.
Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar de pára-quedas pela primeira vez em pleno voo.	Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar de pára-quedas pela primeira vez em pleno vôo.	Dizem que é uma sensação incrível saltar de paraquedas pela primeira vez em pleno voo.

Enacting

This spelling reform

Spelling reform

Many languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated, change to spelling takes place. Proposals for such reform are also common....

was meant to go into effect after all signatory countries had ratified it, but at the end of the decade only Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal had done so, so the agreement could not go into effect.

At the July 2004 summit of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (including East Timor), São Tomé and Príncipe ratified the agreement, and a modification was made to the text, allowing the reform to go forward in those countries which had already ratified it, and accepting the official orthographies in the other countries as legitimate in the meantime; however, this was to happen after a transition period which was not defined.

The old orthographies continue to predominate in their respective countries until ratification of the 1990 Agreement. Brazil changed on January 1, 2009.

The changes were accepted by Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea where the capital Malabo is situated.Annobón is the southernmost island of Equatorial Guinea and is situated just south of the equator. Bioko island is the northernmost point of Equatorial Guinea. Between the two islands and to the...

, which adopted Portuguese as one of its official languages on July 13, 2007.

In Portugal

Portugal

the change was signed into law on July 21, 2008 by the President allowing for a 6-year transitional period, during which both orthographies will co-exist. As of March 2010, the government has only haltingly enacted spelling reform officially, with the independent press taking the plunge instead.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.