The signatories included official representatives from all of the Portuguese-language countries except East Timor, which was under Indonesian occupation at the time, but later adhered to the Agreement, in 2004.
The agreement's objectives of unifying the orthography in all CPLP countries and compiling a common vocabulary for the entire Portuguese language have not been fully achieved and failed.
As of the decade of 2020, the agreement does not have complete adoption from the Portuguese-speaking countries, still without reaching its objectives of unification of the orthography and compilation of a vocabulary common to the Lusophony.
The contents and the legal value of the treaty have not achieved a consensus among linguists, philologists, scholars, journalists, writers, translators and figures of the arts, politics and business of the Brazilian and Portuguese societies.
[citation needed] Until the beginning of the 20th century, in Portugal as in Brazil, an orthography was used that, by rule, relied on Greek or Latin etymology to form words, e.g. pharmacia ("pharmacy"), lyrio ("lily"), and diccionario ("dictionary"), among others.
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").
In June 2004, the heads of state and government of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), gathered in São Tomé and Príncipe, approved a "Second Amending Protocol for the Orthographic Agreement" that, apart from permitting the addition of East Timor, provided that, instead of ratification by all countries, ratification by three members would suffice for it to take effect.
Vasco Graça Moura, writer and former member of the European Parliament, 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.
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.
In Portugal the change was signed into law on 21 July 2008 by the president allowing for a six-year transitional period, during which both orthographies co-existed.
As of January 2016, transitions have also ended in Cape Verde and Brazil, making the reformed Portuguese orthography obligatory in three of the nine lusophone countries.