Brazil is the world’s largest Portuguese-speaking country by population.
Portuguese is Brazil’s official and overwhelmingly dominant language, spoken across the country of more than 200 million people. Brazil is also the largest country in South America, covering about 8.5 million square kilometres.
Portugal introduced Portuguese during the colonial period beginning in the sixteenth century. Over time, Brazilian Portuguese developed distinctive pronunciation, vocabulary and usage, while remaining mutually related to European Portuguese. Brazil’s language also includes words and influences from Indigenous and African languages.
Portugal is the historical origin of the language, but its population is far smaller than Brazil’s. Angola and Mozambique are other major Portuguese-speaking countries, yet Brazil is the clear leader in both population and geographic scale.