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Arabic Influence on Portuguese Posted by on Oct 17, 2007 in Geography

500 years of Moorish influence will leave a linguistic mark!

The period in which the Moors ruled Spain (roughly from 700 to 1500 common era), also affected Portugal quite a bit. It wasn’t until 1250 that the Moors were expelled from Portugal, and by that point the Arabic language had made quite an impact on the vocabulary of the Portuguese language

Though the Arabic influence can be seen in common words such as cenoura carrot, bairro neighborhood, and xadrez chess, the bulk of the cognate (in many cases identical) words begin with the letter A. This phenomenon is easily explained; words beginning with al or ar in Portuguese often are cognate with an Arabic noun starting with al-. Example: the Portuguese word for lettuce is alface which comes from the Arabic word al-khaç.

Here are two free BYKI Lists of the most common words of this type in Brazilian Portuguese

Learning these words is very helpful for ordering food and reading menus in particular. You will notice that many many Portuguese words for food come from Arabic. Who knew?

For a longer list of these words, check out wiki, and for an entertaining article by a seasoned traveler, read this piece.

Thanks to André Barbosa for the audio recording!

photo by meanest indian

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Comments:

  1. Kate:

    hi, I am going to Brazil mid next year, so I am going to learn Portuguese. I also really want to learn Spanish but do you think it will be too difficult or confusing learning both languages at the same time?

  2. Christopher:

    Thanks for your comment, and for reading the blog!

    Good question about learning both languages at the same time. I’m sure for everyone it’s different, but my gut instinct is that you should learn one at a time. The basic rule is that the more proficient you get, the easier it is to differentiate the languages, so if you really committed to learning Portuguese, then once proficient you could start in on Spanish without a problem.

    But then again maybe learning both at the same time would disambiguate the cognates right from the start… not sure.

    If you are going to Brazil, I definitely recommend learning Portuguese fairly well. It’s not terribly difficult, and will have an enormous impact on your experience; English is really not too commonly spoken down there.

    • Carla:

      @Christopher Hi. I’m Portuguese. In Brazil you will learn Portuguese, but a Portuguese with accent. To be clearer, is like going to the States to learn English. I live in London and I noticed that, I can easily understand Brazilians but they struggle to understand me because I speak Portuguese from Portugal ( is my native language ). I also speak Spanish fluently and the fact that I am Portuguese makes it easier because of the phonetics. My advice is for you to try and learn Portuguese without accent, and, after you dominate the language, then it makes it easier to learn Spanish.

  3. Sarah M:

    Hey, I don’t know if anyone reads this, but if you do I have a quick question.

    This entry is about the linguistic effects of Arabic on Portuguese. I was wondering if you could recommend any books on this topic as I am doing a report on the effects of different languages on Portuguese.

    Thanks so much for your time!

  4. Carla:

    There are some books that give good examples and explain it very well but the best option would be for you to go to Portugal and investigated yourself because, most of the books just covers specific regions.