World Language Map

Where is Portuguese spoken?

Portuguese (português) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Brazil, Angola, Portugal, Mozambique and 22 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Portuguese is spoken

Portuguese is spoken in 26 countries: Brazil, Angola, Portugal, Mozambique and 22 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Brazil91%200,247,320
Angola67%24,925,407
Portugal96%9,798,912
Mozambique27%9,004,770
Guinea-Bissau100%2,132,330
Timor-Leste59%889,077
France1.3%888,870
Cape Verde76%464,371
Canada0.9%360,792
Switzerland3.4%301,259
São Tomé and Príncipe85%190,027
United Kingdom0.2%136,918
Luxembourg16%107,401
Macau2.3%14,822
Antigua and Barbuda1.6%1,642
AndorraNot givenNot given
ArgentinaNot givenNot given
BoliviaNot givenNot given
ColombiaNot givenNot given
GuyanaNot givenNot given
ParaguayNot givenNot given
PeruNot givenNot given
SpainNot givenNot given
SurinameNot givenNot given
UruguayNot givenNot given
VenezuelaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Portuguese is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Portuguese.

How many people speak Portuguese?

Wikidata gives about 254.3 million first-language speakers (tsf.pt, 2019). It also lists about 6.3 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Portuguese sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Portuguese as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Southwestern Shifted Romance
  12. West Ibero-Romance
  13. Galician Romance
  14. Macro-Portuguese
  15. Brazil-Portugal Portuguese
  16. Portuguese

Related languages

Other languages in the Brazil-Portugal Portuguese group:

More about Portuguese

Codes: ISO 639-3 por, Glottolog port1283. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Portuguese is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Portuguese

Where is Portuguese spoken?

Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Angola, Portugal, Mozambique and 22 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 91% of the population of Brazil, which is about 200,247,320 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Portuguese?

Wikidata gives about 254.3 million first-language speakers (tsf.pt, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 6.3 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012).

Which language family is Portuguese in?

Glottolog places Portuguese in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance, West Ibero-Romance, Galician Romance, Macro-Portuguese and Brazil-Portugal Portuguese.

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