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Portuguese ( português (help·info) or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999) which spanned from Brazil in the Americas to Goa and other parts of India and Macau in China. It was used as the exclusive lingua franca on the island of Sri Lanka for almost 350 years. During that time, many creole languages based on Portuguese also appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Today it is one of the world's major languages, ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (between 177 and 191 million). It is the language of about half of South America, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal's former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in eight countries (see the table on the right), also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada. Today, Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique.[3] It is also one of the official languages of the Chinese special administrative region of Macau (with Chinese) and East Timor, (with Tetum). It is a native language of most of the population in Portugal (100%), Brazil (100%), São Tomé and Príncipe (95%) and Angola (60%), and is the most widely spoken language in Mozambique (40%), though only 6.5% are native speakers. No data is available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, and the monolingual population speaks Cape Verdean Creole.[4] Small Portuguese-speaking communities subsist in former overseas colonies of Portugal such as Macau, where it is spoken as a first language by 0.6% of the population[5], and East Timor.
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