Portuguese vs Spanish: how different are they really?
Spanish and Portuguese are close enough that a Spanish speaker can read a Portuguese newspaper with some effort, and far enough apart that the same speaker is often lost in a Brazilian conversation. We wanted a number instead of an impression, so we measured something simple: how many of the 1,000 most common Spanish words are spelt exactly the same way among the 1,000 most common words of Brazilian Portuguese. The answer is 242 — and the most interesting part is which words they are.
The measurement
Both word lists come from the same kind of text, film and television subtitles (the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus), so they reflect how people talk rather than how they write. "Spelt identically" means exactly that: the same letters with the same accents, so está matches está but not esta. For comparison, the same count against Italian and French:
| Spanish top 1,000 against the top 1,000 of | Spelt identically | Of which real shared words | Ignoring accents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portuguese (Brazil) | 242 | 223 | 284 |
| Portuguese (Portugal) | 253 | 237 | 296 |
| Italian | 118 | 99 | 138 |
| French | 61 | 42 | 78 |
The middle column removes things that match only because they are not really Spanish or Portuguese at all: character names from dubbed and subtitled films (John, Jack, Michael), English left in the subtitles (ok, hey), and interjections every language spells alike (oh, ah). With those out, 223 of the thousand commonest Spanish words appear, letter for letter, among the thousand commonest in Brazil — about twice as many as in Italian and five times as many as in French.
Ignoring accents raises every figure, because the two languages often agree on a word and disagree on where the accent goes, or whether it needs one.
What the overlap hides
A shared spelling is not a shared word. Most of the 223 are genuine — casa, vida, mundo, nada, gente, problema mean the same thing in both — but the very commonest of them include some of the most misleading pairs in either language. These are the false friends among the shared top-1,000 spellings, each checked in both languages:
| Rank in Spanish | Word | In Spanish | In Brazilian Portuguese |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | no | no, not | in the (em + o); no is não |
| 25 | si | if (yes is sí) | oneself, after a preposition; if is se |
| 34 | tu | your (you is tú) | you (informal) |
| 39 | todo | all; everything | all, the whole (everything is tudo) |
| 61 | o | or | the (masculine); or is ou |
| 96 | dos | two | of the (de + os) |
| 176 | vale | OK (in Spain); it is worth | it is worth; a valley |
| 333 | pronto | soon, right away | ready |
| 344 | os | you, to you (plural, in Spain) | the (masculine plural) |
| 352 | da | gives; give! | of the (de + a) |
| 378 | cara | face; expensive | face; in Brazil also guy, mate |
| 785 | pelo | hair | by the, through the (por + o); also body hair, fur |
| 924 | das | you give | of the (de + as) |
The top of that table is the striking part. The third most common word in Spanish, no, is in Brazilian Portuguese a contraction meaning "in the"; a Portuguese speaker's "no" is não. Spanish o ("or") is the Portuguese masculine article; Spanish si ("if") is Portuguese "oneself", while "if" is se. Several of the rest are Portuguese contractions of a preposition and an article — da, das, dos, pelo — that happen to spell Spanish words. The overlap is largest exactly where the grammar lives, which is why a Spanish speaker can guess the topic of a Portuguese sentence and still misread how it fits together.
What the overlap cannot show: sound
Everything above is about spelling, and spelling is where the two languages are closest. Brazilian Portuguese has nasal vowels, reduces its unstressed vowels, and in most of Brazil turns t and d before an i sound into something close to English "ch" and "j" — so a word spelt identically can sound quite different. That is the usual explanation for why reading Portuguese comes more easily to a Spanish speaker than following it spoken, and it is something no spelling count can measure.
Brazil or Portugal?
The Spanish list shares slightly more identical spellings with European Portuguese (237 real shared words) than with Brazilian (223). The difference is small; where the two varieties really part company is in everyday vocabulary and in how you address people: você is word number 7 in the Brazilian list and 59 in the European one. The whole comparison of the two varieties is in how many words you need to speak Portuguese.
So how different are they?
In writing, close: nearly a quarter of the everyday core is spelt identically, and far more is recognisable with a small change. In grammar, close enough to be dangerous: the commonest shared spellings are the likeliest to mean something else. In sound, further apart than the spelling suggests.
For a Spanish speaker that makes Portuguese one of the fastest languages to start and one of the easiest to get subtly wrong. The Brazilian Portuguese word list and the Spanish one are both in frequency order, so you can see the overlap for yourself; the Portuguese course teaches Brazilian Portuguese from the first word. How long each language takes from English is in the easiest languages for English speakers and how long it takes to learn Spanish.
The first 1,000 Spanish words are also free to download, as a printable PDF and a CSV for Excel or Anki.
Sources
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The overlap counts and the false-friend table are computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.pyand printed from its output rather than typed; the list of non-words it excludes and the false friends are set out, word by word, in that script.