Portuguese-speaking world
[23] The ancestor of modern Portuguese, Galician–Portuguese,[clarification needed] began developing in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, in an area encompassing present-day northern Portugal and Galicia, at around the 9th century.
The Galician language used to form a common dialect continuum with Portuguese during the Middle Ages, denominated as Galician–Portuguese by historians.
The Consello da Cultura Galega (Council of Galician Culture) has been considered an observer member of the CPLP since 2016.
In Luxembourg, 19% of the population speaks Portuguese as mother tongue, making it the largest minority language by percentage in a Western European country.
In 2007, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema announced a decision to make Portuguese the third official language of the country after Spanish and French.
Portuguese is the sole official language of Mozambique and serves as a lingua franca between the various ethnic groups in the country.
Large Portuguese-speaking communities are found in Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia due to immigration from the Lusophone African countries.
[34] There are over 500,000 people of Portuguese descent living in Canada; however, most of the community's population now speaks English or French as their primary language.
A Portuguese-based creole known as Papiamento, is commonly spoken in the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao.
[clarification needed] Migration from Brazil also led to a great number of Portuguese speakers in the Southern Cone (especially Uruguay with portunhol da pampa), Paraguay (see brasiguayos), other regions of South America (especially Bolivia) except Venezuela, Japan (see Brazilians in Japan 400,000 and dekasegi, official numbers do not include second generation Portuguese speakers and naturalized citizens), South Korea, the Philippines (see Brazilians in the Philippines), and Israel (see Aliyah from Latin America in the 2000s).
Although Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in South America, it has the largest population, area and economy on the continent.
Thus, the South American trade bloc Mercosul uses Portuguese alongside Spanish as its working languages.
Given the proximity and trading relations between Portuguese speaking Brazil, and its respective Spanish speaking nations, Portuguese is offered as a foreign (sometimes obligatory) language course at most schools in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and has become the second-most-studied foreign language (after English) in these countries.
[42] Given the similarities between Spanish and Portuguese, a colloquial mix of both, unofficially called "Portuñol" or "Portunhol", is spoken by large number of people travelling between Brazil and its Spanish-speaking neighbours.
Meanwhile, on the Indonesian side, it is rare to hear a Portuguese speaker because it lost in competition with the local language after becoming a Dutch colony in 18th century.
Due to the one country, two systems policy of China regarding its special administrative regions, Macau is able to retain Portuguese as an official language alongside Cantonese.
There has been an increase in the teaching of Portuguese owing to the growing trade links between China and lusophone nations such as Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor, with 5,000 students learning the language.
[citation needed] In Malacca, Malaysia and Singapore (and a diaspora community in Perth, Australia) a Portuguese creole known as Papiá Kristang or Cristão is still spoken by some of the Eurasian population.
