05/05/2024
🌍 In 2019, UNESCO, an arm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, chose 5th May as the date to celebrate the World Portuguese Language Day. According to the organisation’s own website, Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in the global Southern Hemisphere, the fifth most used in the world and, by the end of the century, it will have over 500 million speakers.
🎉Celebrate the Portuguese language and its cultures by learning more about them!
If you’d like to know more about the Portuguese language and its cultures, here are some tips from Fernanda Rodrigues, creative writing teacher and co-founder of the Creative Writing Project:
1) Film: For those who like the big screen, the documentary Línguas: Vidas em Português (Languages: Lives in Portuguese) is a must-see! The 105-minute film features testimonials from famous and anonymous speakers from six Portuguese-speaking countries around the world. The work is directed by Victor Lopes.
2) Book: Latim em pó (Latin in Powdered Form) is a journey through the formation of the Portuguese language. Written by one of Brazil’s greatest translators, and in addition to retrieving the historiography, the book aims to provoke reflection in the reader on how they use their own language. The work was published by Companhia das Letras.
3) Book: for those who want to know more about the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, the book Viva a língua brasileira! (Long live the Brazilian language!) by Sérgio Rodrigues, published by Companhia das Letras, is an amusing almanac that records the history of the variant in the country and, in some cases, compares it with the European Portuguese variant — as in the use of the “porquês” (whys). In addition to having an informal nature, the work is an excellent manual that serves as a reference in moments of doubt when communicating.
4) Courses: one of the coolest ways to celebrate a language is by communicating through it. Foreigners can learn Portuguese in Altissia’s courses. Portuguese speakers can study 24 other languages (Bulgarian, Canadian French, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, North American English, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish). And all these at a high quality and without having to leave home!
https://www.altissia.org/
