Portuguese (português or, in full, língua portuguesa) is a Romance language and the sole official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese and Portuguese creole speakers are also found in Goa, Daman and Diu in India; in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka; in the Indonesian island of Flores; and in Malacca in Malaysia.
Portuguese is a part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 260 million total speakers, Portuguese is usually listed as the sixth most natively spoken language in the world, the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers, and a major language of the Southern Hemisphere. It is also the most spoken language in South America and the second-most spoken in Latin America after Spanish, and is an official language of the European Union, Mercosul, OAS, ECOWAS and the African Union.
Source: Wiki
Why Study Portuguese?
With over 230 million native speakers spread throughout Brazil, Europe (Portugal and the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Madeira), Africa (in Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and Asia (in East Timor, Macau, and Goa), Portuguese is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. There are also large and vibrant Portuguese and Brazilian immigrant communities right here in the United States and Canada. Portuguese shares some grammatical rules, sentence structure, and similar vocabulary with other Romance languages; so, if you already speak French, Spanish or Italian, Portuguese is an easy and fun language to learn! To study Portuguese is an asset in today’s global economy, as Brazil’s economy is among the largest in the world.