What language is phonetically closer to European Portuguese, European Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese?

[Dtmont]

This might be a very silly question but I am curious, what language is phonetically closer to the Portuguese spoken in Portugal? Is it European Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese? What about if you add Galician to this?

[Random Review]

This might be a very silly question but I am curious, what language is phonetically closer to the Portuguese spoken in Portugal? Is it European Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese? What about if you add Galician to this?

I don't know about Galician; but IMO Brazilian Portuguese is phonetically much closer to European Portuguese than Spanish is. But that's because Spanish and Portuguese are chalk and cheese phonetically. I genuinely think even English is closer phonetically than Spanish in many respects (although it actually isn't very close at all ).

Brazilian and European Portuguese are phonetically much more different than dialects of the same language usually are but comfortably much more similar to each other than either is to Spanish.

Some people think Russian and Polish are phonetically quite similar to European Portuguese; but I never studied either language, so I couldn't say.

[tastyonions]

European Portuguese does have some superficial similarities to Russian (darker L than many Romance languages, vowel reduction, heaping helpings of "SH" sound). When I go to Google (not logged in) and type "Portuguese sounds" the first autocomplete choice is "Portuguese sounds like Russian." It's a Quora question:

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Portugue ... ke-Russian

So a fair number of people seem to have the impression. Of course as someone who speaks Portuguese but not Russian, I can understand one pretty well and the other not at all.

[Speakeasy]

Without a doubt, the two main variants of Portuguese (European, Brazilian) are phonetically closer to one another than either variant of Spanish (European, Latin American).

For a fascinating discussion of the differences between Portuguese and Spanish, as well as the advantages that a speaker of Spanish will have in learning Portuguese and the and distinct challenges that he will face, I suggest that you consult the Foreign Service Institute’s training manual “From Spanish to Portuguese” which is freely-available on the Yojik website. A quick read of this manual will respond to your question.

From Spanish to Portuguese
https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/FSI/fsi-portuguese.html

[David1917]

European Portuguese does have some superficial similarities to Russian (darker L than many Romance languages, vowel reduction, heaping helpings of "SH" sound). When I go to Google (not logged in) and type "Portuguese sounds" the first autocomplete choice is "Portuguese sounds like Russian." It's a Quora question:

Great Langfocus video recently came out on this topic.

Other Langfocus videos on the general discussion of Portuguese vs. Spanish:

Portuguese and what makes it intriguing
How Similar are Spanish and Portuguese - Updated version, haven't viewed it yet to see if it's just an expansion or complete reworking of the first one he did a year ago, but either way it will be easy to find.

[nooj]

This might be a very silly question but I am curious, what language is phonetically closer to the Portuguese spoken in Portugal? Is it European Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese? What about if you add Galician to this?

Dialects of Portuguese in the north of Portugal sound pretty much identical to the dialects of Galician spoken close to the border.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_phonology

Happy reading, and happy new year!

[Iceberg]

Disclaimer: this is gonna be long. Skip my answer if you don't have patience.

The short answer: I believe the dialects of Galician are the closest to European Portuguese.

Now, the long answer:

How can we objectively compare the phonetics system of European Portuguese, European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Galician? I thought it would be more challenging to focus only on the phonetic aspect of the aforementioned languages, but without mentioning anything about its phonological aspects. I will simplify some definitions before trying to give my two cents on this interesting topic.

Phonetics is one field studied in linguistics, but also in physics, physiology etc. Phonetics refers to study of physical properties of sounds in the human speech. It not only to the realization of those and their combinations (and sometimes sign elements of the language), but also refers to the acoustic and physiological features. And, a sound that is possible in human language is called a phone.

How about phonology? It is the study of how the sound system of the language (and its sign elements) are organized in the speaker’s mind and how it is used to convey meaning. Phonology is the discipline that studies the minimum linguistic unit, the phoneme, which refers to the psychological aspect of a sound. It is how languages (and dialects) analyses an individual sound that conveys a difference in meaning.

So, going back to your original question, I’d exclude Spanish at this moment. Why?

Despite the lexicon of both Portuguese and Spanish being mutually intelligible to a high degree, they differ in the phonological aspects. Read the “phonology” part below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Portuguese_and_Spanish

European Portuguese

It is constituted of 35 phonemes, 14 of which are vowels, 19 consonants and 2 semivowels.

Brazilian Portuguese

It is constituted of 34 phonemes, 13 of which are vowels, 19 are consonants and 2 are semivowels.

The phonemes used in Brazilian Portuguese are often different from those used in European Portuguese. In many cases, you will note that the same word has a different phonetic notation. For example:

(On the left, standard EP; on the right, "standard" BP)
ténis/tênis (tenis) '‘tennis" ['tεniʃ] ['tenis]
bónus/bônus (bonus) "bonus" ['bɔnuʃ] ['bonus]

Some dialects of both BP and EP, however, share similar, if not the same basic features from the phonetic point of view.

Depending on the dialects, the number of the phonemes may vary from the numbers I’ve written above, that is, for both BP and EP.

How about Galician?

Standard Galician has 26 phonemes, 7 of which refers to the vowels and 19 are consonants.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_phonology

Note that Galician contrasts with Portuguese by the absence of nasal vowels, and the presence of a single voiceless alveolar fricative /s/, as opposed to Portuguese voiceless /s/ and voiced /z/, as in: (face:fase). Likewise, Galician has only the voiceless palatal fricative /ʃ/, while Portuguese contrasts voiceless /ʃ/ with voiced /ʒ/. Finally, simplifying things here, unstressed vowels tend to retain their quality in Galician, whereas in European Portuguese they tend to be reduced to [ə] or dropped altogether. There are some other differences here, available in Galician, Portuguese and Spanish:

https://gl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diferenzas_entre_o_galego_e_o_portugu%C3%A9s
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diferen%C3%A7as_entre_o_galego_e_o_portugu%C3%AAs
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diferencias_entre_el_gallego_y_el_portugu%C3%A9s

The answer to the original question

I don't know what should be the criteria to determine a good answer...

In terms of inventory of the sounds possible in EP, PB appears to be the closest variant. That said, as I wrote, there are many differences when it comes to how actually the words are pronounced by native speakers. I could type here 1000 words, just to exemplify those differences.

We have to consider other phonological phenoma, such as the structure of the syllables, ressyllabification, other phonolofical processes such as lenition, devoicing, monophthongization, diphthongization; prosody (stress, pitch and rhythm), to say the least.

Few examples in Portuguese, for those who are interested in:

Syllable

It refers to short phone sequences in any language. It follows rules specifying the position in which phone can occur, which phones can occur next to each other and so on.

In EP:

pneu-monia
a-dvo-ga-do
a-gn'os-ti-co

Those words in BP may have minor differences in terms of syllabification:

pneumonia (pneumonia) [pnew-mu-'ni-ɐ] [pi-new-mu-'ni-ɐ]
advogado (lawyer) [ad-vo-
ga-du] [a-i-vo-
ga-du]∼[a-de-vo-
ga-du]
agn'ostico (agnostic) [ag-'nɔs-ti-ku] [a-gi-'nɔs-tʃi-ku]

Note that in the left side, it is the way when individuals were monitored. In contrast, the one on the right side is how individuals spoke in spontaneous speech.

The syllabification in EP has some minor differences, if compared to BP.

Ressylabification

In EP, the word final /ɾ/ would be like this for "falar alto" (to speak loudly): [fɐ-'la-'ɾal-tu]. In BP, this /ɾ/ in that position tends to be dropped for verb infinitives (in spontaneous speech).

Likewise, in EP word-final /l/, phonetically a velarized lateral, connects with the following vowel, as in "papel amarelo" (yellow paper): [pɐ'pε-lɐ-mɐ-'ɾε-lu]. In BP, in contrast, syllable-final /l/ is usually a velar glide [w], as in: [pa'pεw] (paper), thus "papel amarelo" in BP:
[pa-'pεw-a-ma-
rε-lu] or [pa-'pε-wa-ma-'rε-lu], though these are possible as well: [pa-'pε-lɐ-mɐ-'ɾε-lu] ∼ [pa-'pε-wɐ-mɐ-'ɾε-lu].

Lenition:

It is involved in the weakning and loss of unstressed vowels in BP:

para > pra.
falar > falá
comer > comê
ver > vê
jogar futebol> jogá futebol
pegar > pegá

In EP:

pessoa > p'ssoa [p'soɐ]

Devoicing

It refers to the process whereby a voiced phone becomes voiceless.

Example in EP:

É do Porto. ['ε-du -'poɾ-tu]). Both "u" in this example, it tends to become voiceless phone.

Monophthongization

It refers to the process that reduces a diphthong to a single vowel.

Example in BP:

Falou pouco (spoke little): in many dialects you will hear [fa'low 'powku], but you will also see [fa'lo'poku] in other dialects.

Diphthongization

It is the opposite of monophthongization.

mas (but, more) [mas] becomes [majs].
pés (feet) [pεs] becomes [pεjs].
vez (time) [ves] becomes [vejs].
pôs third person of singular (put) [pos] becomes [pojs].
luz (light) [lus] becomes [lujs].
português (Portuguese) [pohtu'ges] becomes [pohtu'gejs].

Other things to be considered

When referring to BP, we also have one issue. What dialect are we considering here? There have been many debate on which dialect should be the "standard Brazilian Portuguese", the "Paulistano" (São Paulo) or "Carioca" (Rio de Janeiro). The latter has been influenced by the Portuguese spoken in Portugal due to historical reasons. And everything I wrote, could and should be compared with Galician, so that we would have an overview of the whole picture.

Other considerations

Okay. I know that I wrote, wrote and wrote, but I haven't answered the OP question yet. Shame on me.

Some specialists propose the division of Galician and Portuguese in three phonological big zones: Center-Southern Portuguese dialects, Northern Portuguese dialects and Galician dialects.

If by EP we focus on the Northern Portuguese dialects, then, it will be close to Galician dialects. For instance, Northern speech follows Galician in preserving the contrast /ʃ/ : /tʃ/, while Southern speech has only /ʃ/ (orthographically ch or x).

There are some border areas between Portugal and Spain that, due to historical contact, there are dialects mixturing both aspects of EP and European Spanish. We could and should see how they look like in border areas from both Portuguese and Spanish sides. Maybe something like Fala variant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fala_language

Last, my biased opinion as a native speaker of Portuguese, with exposure to many dialects of BP, EP, Galician and European Spanish, I'd still stick to Galician. However, different criteria might lead me to different opinion.

[Iversen]

Thank you to Iceberg for a very long and very informative post. I would also go for Galician, since for an outsider like me Gallego only differs from European Portuguese by being a tad simpler (you can watch TV Galacia here to experience this language). If you can understand spoken European Portuguese you can also understand spoken Gallego.

The same could be said about Brazilian Portuguese, but personally I feel that its pronuncation is slightly more exotic - but very attractive. I'm going to visit Recife and Natal in 2019, and when I return home I'm fairly sure that my Portuguese will sound differently from how it sounds today where it represents an unholy mixture of rotal rubbish and Portuguese Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese can of course also be heard on the internet, for instance here. And finally Spanish... well, in my opinion any kind of Spanish more distant from any kind of Portugues than these are among themselves - if anything, it's Galician that it closest to Castillian because of its lack of truly nasal vowels.

Btw. once near the end of my study time I met on of my teachers from the Romance Institute in Århus on a ferry, and he handed me the book he was reading and asked me to identify the language. And I returned it with the remark that it had to be Gallego since it sounded like Portuguese, but looked like Spanish (or more precisely like Medieval Spanish with a lot of x's). I think he was slightly annoyed because his challenge fell flat to the ground - but it was nice to know that I had a true polyglot as teacher.

[rfnsoares]

As a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker, I would say that there is no phonetic differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese. I might be mistaken, of course, because I'm not a linguist, but the pronunciation rules are the same, although the difference in the accents is VERY marked.

[SGP]

As a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker, I would say that there is no phonetic differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese. I might be mistaken, of course, because I'm not a linguist, but the pronunciation rules are the same, although the difference in the accents is VERY marked.

You know much more about Portuguese than me.
Today I was reading about whether to learn PT-PT or PT-PX (Brazilian Portuguese).
A certain article I stumbled upon stated that there would be a few differences about the vowels.
Now I wonder if they got it right or not.

Brazilian Portuguese is spoken more slowly and with open vowels, while European Portuguese may sound quite rushed and mumbled to an untrained ear. For that reason, many people are inclined to believe the former is easier to master than the latter.

There is also something else, from the very same source link. But that one is more about the different variants or dialects.

It’s worth noting that Brazilian Portuguese has more regional accents. This won’t hinder your understanding of the language in any way, but each state has its own distinct little twang. For instance, the way Rio de Janeiro natives pronounce the letter “s” at the end of a word is quite similar to the way European Portuguese speakers do (with a distinctive “sh” sound).

European Portuguese has its own regional quirks, too. The way the letter “s” is pronounced tends to differ between the regions—making, for instance, Northern and Central-Southern Portuguese accents quite distinct from one another.