Portuguese orthography

In ambiguous cases, the correct spelling is determined through a combination of etymology with morphology and tradition; so there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters or digraphs.

Knowing the main inflectional paradigms of Portuguese and being acquainted with the orthography of other Western European languages can be helpful.

Although many letters have more than one pronunciation, their phonetic value is often predictable from their position within a word; that is normally the case for the consonants (except x).

For the letter r, "at the start of a syllable (not between vowels)" means "at the beginning of a word or after l, n, s, or a prefix ending in a consonant".

/ˈdupluˌve/ Portuguese uses digraphs, pairs of letters which represent a single sound different from the sum of their components.

The trema used to be employed to explicitly indicate labialized sounds before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩ (quebra vs. cinqüenta), but since its elimination, such words have to be memorised.

Pronunciation divergences mean some of these words may be spelled differently (quatorze / catorze and quotidiano / cotidiano).

By convention, s is written instead of etymological ç at the beginning of words, as in "São", the hypocoristic form of the female name "Conceição".

The grave accent marks the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis), normally the preposition a and an article or a demonstrative pronoun: a + aquela = àquela "at that", a + a = à "at the".

Sometimes à and ò are used in other contraction forms, e.g.: cò(s) and cà(s) (from the comparative conjunction ‘than’ and definite articles o and a).

[5] According to the orthographic rules of 1990 (adopted only in Portugal, Brazil, and Cabo Verde in 2009), these forms should be spelled without the grave accent.

The other way to separate diphthongs and non-hiatic vowel combinations is to use acute (as in modern saúde) or circumflex (as in old-style Corôa).

The use of diacritics in personal names is generally restricted to the combinations above, often also by the applicable Portuguese spelling rules.

[12] Brazilian birth registrars, on the other hand, are likely to accept names containing any (Latin) letters or diacritics and are limited only to the availability of such characters in their typesetting facility.

The other rhotic phoneme of Portuguese, which may be pronounced as a trill [r] or as one of the fricatives [x], [ʁ], or [h], according to the idiolect of the speaker, is either written ⟨rr⟩ or ⟨r⟩, as described below.

Note that there are two main groups of accents in Portuguese, one in which the sibilants are alveolar at the end of syllables (/s/ or /z/), and another in which they are postalveolar (/ʃ/ or /ʒ/).

In the plural, the ending -⟨m⟩ changes into -⟨ns⟩; for example bem, rim, bom, um → bens, rins, bons, uns.

The grapheme -⟨en⟩- is also pronounced as a nasal diphthong in a few compound words, such as bendito (bem + dito), homenzinho (homem + zinho), and Benfica.

Some general guidelines for spelling are given below: Loanwords with a /ʃ/ in their original languages receive the letter ⟨x⟩ to represent it when they are nativised: xampu "shampoo".

When one wants to stress the sound difference in dialects in which it merged the convention is to use ⟨tch⟩: tchau "ciao" and República Tcheca "Czech Republic".

Alveolar affricates [ts] and [dz], though, are more likely to be preserved (pizza, Zeitgeist, tsunami, kudzu, adzuki, etc.

), although not all of these hold up across some dialects (/zaitʃiˈgaiʃtʃi/ for 'Zeitgeist, /tʃisuˈnɐ̃mi/ for tsunami and /aˈzuki/ for adzuki [along with spelling azuki]) Portuguese syllabification rules require a syllable break between double letters: ⟨cc⟩, ⟨cç⟩, ⟨mm⟩, ⟨nn⟩, ⟨rr⟩, ⟨ss⟩, or other combinations of letters that may be pronounced as a single sound: fric-ci-o-nar, pro-ces-so, car-ro, ex-ce(p)-to, ex-su-dar.

All digraphs are however broken down into their constituent letters for the purposes of collation, spelling aloud, and in crossword puzzles.

The apostrophe (') appears as part of certain phrases, usually to indicate the elision of a vowel in the contraction of a preposition with the word that follows it: de + água = d'água.

The hyphen (-) is used to make compound words, especially plants and animal names like papagaio-de-rabo-vermelho "red-tailed parrot".

Each element in such compounds is treated as an individual word for accentuation purposes: matarias + o = matá-lo-ias "You would kill it/him", beberá + a = bebê-la-á "He/she will drink it".

The main ones are: As of 2016, the reformed orthography under the 1990 agreement is obligatory in Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal, but most adult people do not use it.