# Does Spanish sound like Portuguese?



## Nerd1

Hello, I am Brazilian. I am speaking about my dialect speacifically.

I am asking this because some people say they sound the same.
Others say they are very different, but these kind of people are language learners. They search questions about that specific language to answer. I think this Is not an impartial opinion.

Of course, for Spanish and Portuguese speakers they (Spanish and Portuguese) are different. They can hear even national differences of their native language.
For example, I am not able to (I doubt that 99% of Brazilians can) distinguish between British English and American English accent, or between Argentine and Spanish (don't be mad at me). But they are the native speakers, so they can say "that guy is English" or "Argentine" etc.
But I can distinguish between French and German, English etc.

If an average person that don't speak neither Spanish or Portuguese listen to two videos, one in Spanish and one in Portuguese, will he think they are the same idiom?
I mean, is much more harder to distinguish than French/German or English/Spanish? 

I am speaking about Brazilian Portuguese, so don't mention experiences with Portuguese people, please.

Tchau, .


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## Juan Nadie

I am a Spanish speaker and I can tell you that some versions of Brazilian Portuguese are so close to some versions of Spanish that I wouldn't be surprised at all if a lot of people (no native of Spanish/Portuguese) couldn't distinguish between them.

But there is nothing extrange with it. Probably you are not able to differenciate Chinese/Japanese or German/Danish and the native speaker of those languages would think that it is impossible to not distinguish them, when they are clearly so different.



My main source for Brazilian language is this site.


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## colcan

Juan Nadie said:


> I am a Spanish speaker and I can tell you that some versions of Brazilian Portuguese are so close to some versions of Spanish that I wouldn't be surprised at all if a lot of people (no native of Spanish/Portuguese) couldn't distinguish between them.


Which versions of Brazilian Portuguese would those be?  I'm not familiar with any variety that sounds like Spanish.

However, the original question is different:  _*Does Spanish sound like Portuguese?*_

My answer is that, AFAIK, only Galician varieties of Spanish sound remotely like Portuguese.


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## Ayazid

Olá Nerd1 D), 

from which part of Brazil you are? I would say that some very traditional and conservative _gaúcho_ accents from the state of Rio Grande do Sul (near to the border with Uruguay) maybe sound kind of close to Spanish, but otherwise all Brazilian accents I know are very different from it, the same for European and African accents of Portuguese. Something else is Galician, which is phonetically so similar to European Spanish, that even when you know Portuguese you might be thinking that it is Spanish for a while.

However, as for Portuguese and Spanish, the very rhytm and melody of these languages are so different that (in my opinion) even people without any knowledge _destes idiomas_ wouldn't confuse them.


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## Juan Nadie

colcan said:


> Which versions of Brazilian Portuguese would those be?  I'm not familiar with any variety that sounds like Spanish.
> 
> However, the original question is different:  _*Does Spanish sound like Portuguese?*_ I think that there is not really a difference between A->B or B->A in this situation.
> 
> My answer is that, AFAIK, only Galician varieties of Spanish sound remotely like Portuguese.


In general those near the line.
Well, the male from Curitiba may be one. Good for you if you can see the difference, but you may not be the general rule.


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## WondererCarvalho

Ayazid said:


> Olá Nerd1 D),
> 
> from which part of Brazil you are? I would say that some very traditional and conservative _gaúcho_ accents from the state of Rio Grande do Sul (near to the border with Uruguay) maybe sound kind of close to Spanish(...)


 
Actually, the most of people I talked about it from Chile to USA say that our accent (I am gaúcho from Porto Alegre) is kind of a Spanish dialect. This is not that solid, but historically, Rio Grande do Sul was a Spanish domain, since Brazil was divided between Spain and Portugal during settlement. Although our accent resembles somewhat Spanish, it is still Portuguese (a strong accent with rolled "r" in some words (like "trator"="dozer" or specific regions). The most similar to Portuguese (Portugal) is the one spoken in Rio de Janeiro.
I know you're asking to non-native speakers of Portuguese, but since lots of people have said to me they found my accent similar to Spanish (strong), I got eager to share it! ^_^
Abraços/hugs!


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## koniecswiata

Well, since we are talking about human perceptions, we are talking about something not completely objective.  Despite being similar languages per se, I would say that Spanish and Portuguese don't sound particularly similar.  You could even go over an inventory of sounds (phonemes) and find quite a few differences that way.  Even if you just focus on vowel quality the differences will become quite apparent.  It's worth mentioning that just because languages are "very similar" due to language history and family, it does not necessarily mean they sound very similar.  
Of course, if you said a one-syllable word like "a" then they might sound similar, but in that case Spanish, Portuguese, as well as English, Polish, Russian, Italian, etc... would all sound "similar".


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## Maroseika

For my ear Spanish and Portuguese sound absolutely differently. Being to Portugal it sometimes seemed to me somebody spoke Russian around the corner (when separate words were not discernible). Obviously, due to the sibilants.


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## XiaoRoel

> Galician, which is phonetically so similar to European Spanish,


En absoluto. Esto no es así:
*Vocales*: 
a) _español_: [a], [e], _, [o], ; 
b) galego [a], [ε], [e], , [ɔ], [o], .
*Consonantes*:
a) español: no tiene [∫]; confunde [y] y [λ]; tiene [x];
b) galego: no tiene [x]; no confunde [y] y [λ]; tiene [∫];
*Tonemas*:
Totalmente diferentes.
*Morfosintaxis*:
El gallego coincide en un 99% con el portugués.
*Vocabulario*:
El vocabulario fundamental del gallego coincide con el portugués; con el español coincide en el nombre de productos y cosas actuales y en parted del lenguaje jurídico y sociopolítico.
La *fonética del gallego se diferencia de la portuguesa*:
a) vocales: el gallego mantiene las pretónicas y postónicas mientras el portugués tiende a eliminirlas o, como míni o obscurecerlas; el gallego sólo conserva las vocales nasales es una pequeña zona dialectal; tampoco el gallego tiene los diptongos nasales /ão/ y /em/ ([eĩ]);
b) consonantes: el gallego convirtió /ge/, /gi/ y /j/ ([Ʒ]) en /x/ ([∫]); también mantiene la pronunciación [c] de /ch/ (como el N. de Portugal); la nasal final es /m/ en portugués y /n/ en galego; /gu/ y /qu/ en gallego pierden la [w]: canto/quanto; garda/guarda.
Resumiendo, el gallego suena a un portugués medieval sin palatal sonora y sin nasales.
El mayor parecido está entre el portugués al norte del Duero y el gallego sureño que a lo largo de la frontera no son fáciles de distinguir.
Por escrito son casi la misma lengua (con variantes ortográficas).
Un dato curioso es que los autores "quinhentistas" portugueses los gallegos los leemos sin necesidad de notas de lectura, mientras un portugués o un brasileño necesitan ediciones anotadas._


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## mancunienne girl

To me they sound completely different. I can understand very little Portuguese, even though I speak Spanish. If I see it written I can make out some of it, uut to my ear Italian sounds much more like Spanish than Portuguese, and I can understand spoken Italian quite a bit, but can't understand any Portuguese! As a non-native speaker of French and Spanish, I can distinguish accents in both these languages. Someone from Madrid sounds much different than someone from Andalucía - and I can usually tell the difference between someone from Seville and someone from Granada, and if you are from Barcelona, and a Catalan speaker, then when speaking castellano the accent is very different! The same goes for French spoken by someone from Marseille and someone from Paris - completely different accent!


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## francisgranada

Hello Everybody,

(I am new in this forum, so let me allow a brief introduction about myself: I am from Slovakia, former Czechoslovakia, my mother tongue is  Hungarian and I am interested in languages, especially the Romance  languages. I also give private lessons in Italian). 

My experience about the recognition of the Romance languages is the following: 

People in Slovakia that do not speak any romance language  (the absolute majority... ) and that do not have any experiences whith Italian/Spanish/Portuguese, generally cannot distinguish the Spanish from the Italian.  It is not too difficult to understand, because e.g. the words of songs like _Una paloma blanca ..._ or _Vivo soñando, vivo cantando ..._ really sound like Italian, especially for somebody who doesn't have any knowledge about these languages. 

During my Italian courses, I try to demonstrate the students also the great variety of the Romance languages and culture (Spanish, Portugese, Catalonian, Neapolitan, Sardinian ...).  When I let them listen some Spanish song, my students are able (of course ) to distiguish the Italian from the Spanish and they can even understand a lot of the lyrics of the Spanish songs. But when I let them listen some Portuguese or Neapolitan song, they surely know that it is not in Italian and not in Spanish, but they can understand almost nothing from the words. Even more, they aren't able to guess the language (e.g. a Portuguese song can be considered to be Neapolitan and vice versa...). 

The French, because of it's typical  pronouciation, but also for traditional reasons, is clearly distiguishable  from other romance languages even for people who don't understand a  single French word...  

Similarly, the people here can generally distinguish the Romanian from other languages, due to the traditional tourisme in Romania. 

The Brasilian Portuguese is not known here, but it could be really interesting to do an experiment, i.e. whether for example a Brasilian song would be considered Spanish or not ... (I am thinking about a student, that doesn't speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese, of course)

Saludos cordiales a todos.


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## Nanon

Olá a todos,

To my ears, they don't. However I am biased, my ears are somewhat trained . And this is a very general response.

But once something funny happened to me at work. I was discussing in Portuguese with two Brazilians, and a French colleague heard us. When the Brazilian visitors left, my colleague told me: "Woaw, you speak excellent Spanish". I told him we had been speaking Portuguese, bot I felt very disappointed... about myself. I was thinking: "How terrible my accent must be!", and also that he should have known I speak Spanish too, because we have been workmates for a long time .

Then I understood. As a Frenchman, he has been exposed to some Portuguese: there are many Portuguese immigrants, or sons of Portuguese immigrants living in France. Therefore, he associates Portuguese with the European variant and when hearing Portuguese, he is expecting final [∫], among other characteristics. I learnt Brazilian Portuguese and the accent I caught is from the São Paulo area (Vanda will laugh when she sees this), so no final [∫] but final [s]. And my visitors were most probably  _paulistas _too. So my co-worker, who speaks neither Spanish nor Portuguese, associated final [s] and a couple of other traits with Spanish... 

This might imply that Spanish would not sound like Portuguese to French ears with the "mental image" of European Portuguese.


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## WondererCarvalho

When I punched out my job this week, my friends and I went to a bar in order to watch the World Cup, and there was a Portuguese guy. When he spoke, everybody looked at him because it's quite easy to tell European accent and Brazilian (Gaúcho) accent. Besides, I work at PUC University, in Languages Lab. Here there are lots of teachers from Argentina and Spain, and even speaking their "portuñol" ("*portu*guês"+"espa*nhol*"), it's too easy to tell their Spanish accent, which by the way varies from one to another depending on where they stem from. Moreover, even when Brazilian students from Rio de Janeiro come here, we already know where they're from.


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## koniecswiata

I agree very much with what Francisgranada said.  It all depends on how much experience or exposure you have had with a language, a foreign language, or group of languages.
The following are statements (not verbatim) I have heard that reflect ignorance, but, then, these people had no reason to know better:

1.  Are you speaking German?--When speaking Polish.
2.  They are speaking Swedish.--They were speaking Polish.
3.  They are speaking Spanish.--They were speaking Greek.

Most often I have heard people confuse German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and other languages with each other...
Then, the vast majority of occidental people confuses Chinese, Korean, and Japanese with each other.  If you hear a bit of each, you quickly get an ear and begin to distinguish them.
So, with all this, I does not surprise me at all that people would confuse Spanish for Portuguese, or Portuguese for Russian, or Romanian for Portuguese.  Of course, with just a bit of exposure, all these languages begin to quickly sound different from each other.
Incidentaly, Brazilian Portuguese usually sounds more "understandable" if you know Spanish but not Portuguese--probably to fewer sibilants, fewer consonant clusters.


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## effeundici

For me Spanish and Portuguese are completely different. Really impossible to make a mistake, even when they are speaking Italian.


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## Dehemelisgrijs

hi 
so, during my short life I was (well, I still am) in contact with both of these languages. I must say that Spanish and Portuguese don't sound that familiar to me. I don't know, it's maybe because I was listening Spanish for ages on TV, and when I first time heard Portuguese I could feel the difference. Yeah, they have some similarities (as a person who can't speak any of them I can tell that for sure) but there's no way I could mix them if I heard one of them, I don't know, in the street


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## OrCuS

For anyone speaking a romance language (as a native) it should be easy. For the rest... not as much.

Could you tell if someone is speaking danish or swedish? I doubt it.


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## Nerd1

"For anyone speaking a romance language (as a native) it should be easy.  For the rest... not as much.

Could you tell if someone is speaking danish or swedish? I doubt it."

I think the same.
I dont get it when ppl say they dont sound the same.
I think brazilian portuguese and argentinian spanish are the same for who dont speak spanish nor portuguese, for the americans for example is very hard to distinguish between the two.

I think that specially argentine spanish is very similar to portuguese.
Once i went to argentina and i understood everything the ppl said to me.
Argentine spanish is very beautiful.


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## Jasmine_Chila

They *look* very similar (writing), but they don't *sound* the same to me.


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## Crana

When I was living in Spain, in Extremadura, near the border with Portugal, I noticed some influence from Portuguese on the pronunciation of certain words in Spanish. For example, 'hasta luego', often sounded more to me like 'ate logo'. I also noticed in Bolivia, along the border of Brazil, that there was a slight influence on Spanish from Portuguese with pronuciation and certain expressions. While I have not formally studied Portuguese, knowing Spanish I am able to notice many similarities in the two languages but there also seems to be many false friends between the two, such as 'cartera' (SP-'wallet/purse') and 'cartera' (Port-'license'), which can mislead the listener. I do think that the average mono-lingual English speaker tends to confuse the two languages and usually can't diferentiate between the two... based on my own observations.


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## Ayazid

Crana said:


> When I was living in Spain, in Extremadura, near the border with Portugal, I noticed some influence from Portuguese on the pronunciation of certain words in Spanish. For example, 'hasta luego', often sounded more to me like 'ate logo'..



In the case of _hasta luego_, I don't think it has anything to do with some Portuguese influence. In Southern Spain (and some parts of Hispanic America) it's pretty common to pronounce syllable final _s_ as _h_ or not to pronounce it at all, so _hasta luego_ sounds like _ahta_ (or_ a'ta_)_ luego_, but it's simply a specific feature of local Spanish.


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## Outsider

Crana wrote _at*e* logo_, though. (The pronunciation of _luego_ as _logo_, or something similar, seems to be fairly frequent across Spain. I'm not sure that the same pronunciation near the border can be attributed to Portuguese influence.)


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## jazyk

> such as 'cartera' (SP-'wallet/purse') and 'cartera' (Port-'license'),


Carteira also means wallet in Portuguese. I can't think of a situation where carteira means license. Could you enlighten us?


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## Outsider

In Portugal there is the expression _carteira profissional_, which I'm guessing can be translated as professional license.


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## jazyk

In Brazil too (also carteira de trabalho), but I think if you say carteira to most Portuguese speakers, they will think of a wallet, a desk or maybe more rarely a female postal worker.


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## Crana

As I stated, these were only personal observations made while living and studying abroad, so I may be wrong. I have overheard and been told by several Brazilian Portuguese court interpreters here in FL that they use "carteira" for license and that there can be some confusion between the Spanish and Portuguese usage, that's all I am basing that comment on.


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## chucrut

Portuguese and Spanish sounds totally different...


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## MALLUS

In my personal opinion, Spanish and Portuguese sound different. But I'm Spanish and, of course, I listen habitually these languages and different Spanish accents. Even for me is sometimes difficult seeing the difference between accents of Spanish America countries. Some separated dialects (v. gr. Argentinian or Mexican Spanish) are very clear. Although for the biggest part of Spanish people, it's impossible knowing if one speaker is from Argentina or from Uruguay (in fact, both accents are very similar).

I think for foreigners that know nothing of Romanic Languages, this difference is almost impossible.

Of course, the difference exists. Inside Spain, as is just written, we have different accent, depending of wich part of Spain we are. In my case, Catalan native speaker, my Spanish has a marked accent (vowels, "L" consonant), although I am bilingual.

Another question are Scandinavian Languages. For the biggest part of filologists, they are the same language. Due to historical reasons, we speak now of three separated standard languages, when in fact three continental scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) are understandable each other. That's why I think the mistake is easier when you are asked about what language is it.


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## koniecswiata

I hope I am not goint off-topic too much, but since we are discussing similarity and difference between languages, especially Spanish and Portuguese.

"The difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army."  I forget who said it, but it is very true.  There are dialects of Chinese that may be more different from each other than Spanish is from Portuguese, or Danish from Norwegian.  

If the speakers of American English decided that their language was not English, then, it wouldn't be English.  It's that simple.  Look what happened to Serbo-Croatian.  Today there are two languages, "Serbian" and "Croatian".  

If you hear a lot of Spanish and Portuguese, they sound different.  If you don't hear them much, then, logically, you would think they sounded the same.


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## Ottilie

For me they sound pretty much similar ,especially in songs. When I see them written,I cannot even guess which is Spanish and which is Portuguese


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## WondererCarvalho

Ottilie said:


> For me they sound pretty much similar ,especially in songs. When I see them written,I cannot even guess which is Spanish and which is Portuguese


 
In Portuguese we use "ção" whereas Spanish uses "ción".
example: can*ção* (português/Portuguese) ; can*ción* (espanhol/Spanish); song (inglês/English). I think most or all the words that use *^* in Portuguese are found in Spanish bearing *´* in its place. "English" itself: ingl*ê*s (P); ingl*é*s (S)

This is just an example of how to tell them apart. But aside many expressions, both have lots of similarities.

I've learned to tell Norwegian and Swedish not just for the use of å (N) and ä (S) for example, but also for the first pronoun "I": jeg (N) and jag (S).

But this differences affect considerably the spoken languages. As a Portuguese speaker, I assure you that I just can't understand spoken Spanish but many few words.


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## Ottilie

Maybe I've got this feeling because I haven't been exposed to these languages enough,I happened to hear them 2-3 times .


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## Istriano

Spanish and Portuguese sound more similar than Tamil and Malayalam.


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