Portuguese

 

About

Portuguese: It’s spoken across the world (Europe, Brazil, Africa, Asia)

Portuguese is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world as of 2018.

Portuguese is an official language in ten countries, including Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

Due to historic ties, Portuguese is also extensively spoken in Goa, India, Macau, China, and Sri Lanka. You might find yourself needing your Portuguese skills in South America, Europe, Africa or even Asia!

How will this Portuguese course help to prepare you for a future career?

Portuguese is one of the languages the US National Security Education Program recognizes as a language of national need. The US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies also includes Portuguese as part of its initiative to promote professionals to learn the language. This national push to encourage the study of Brazilian Portuguese is due to the importance of the Brazilian market, the immense strength of the Brazilian economy, and Brazil’s leadership role in Latin America politics.

Portuguese helps you learn Spanish and other Romance languages.

Did you know that Portuguese and Spanish are closely related? Most people do not know how similar these two languages are. They share an 89% lexical similarity.

The words do not always sound or look precisely the same in Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, if you study Portuguese your hard work will also go along way to help you learn Spanish. The same way, if you already know Spanish, you will be developing Portuguese in a much faster pace.

 

Courses

Hear from our current and former students what they liked about our classes.

 

Check out our full list of courses we offer on the ISU Course Catalog, and see this semester’s courses on the ISU Schedule of Classes.