Brazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by virtually all the 189 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan, and Paraguay. Roughly speaking, the differences between European Portuguese and standard Brazilian Portuguese are comparable to the ones found between British and standard American English. As with many languages, the differences between standard Brazilian Portuguese and its informal vernacular are quite significant, though lexicon and most of the grammar rules remain the same. Nonetheless, there are still scientific debates about the status of that variant due to those differences, especially whether it'd be a case of diglossia or not. The Brazilian formal written standard, which is defined by law and international agreements with other Portuguese-speaking countries, is actually very similar to the European one; but there are several differences in spelling, lexicon, and grammar. European and Brazilian writers also have markedly different preferences when choosing between supposedly equivalent words or constructs. |