preserves the books that record
presidential inaugurations since 1891. By signing the book, the president-elect assumes the commitment to govern the country and defend the
Constitution, continuing the timeline that has been traced since 26 February 1891. Access to the two volumes is restricted in order to protect the heritage. The documents are kept in the Senate Archives, in a room with
temperature,
humidity and
light subject to strict parameters. Organized in two volumes by the Archive Coordination, these documents testify to the historical evolution of the
Portuguese language, based on elements such as the successive loss of
archaisms. This cover book shows: "Term of Inauguration of the Presidents of the Republic of the United States of Brazil." When "United States" of Brazil was still used with the letter Z, and not Brasil with the letter S. There are various differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, such as the dropping of the
second-person conjugations (and, in some dialects, of the
second-person pronoun itself) in everyday usage and the use of subject pronouns () as direct objects.
Grammar Spoken Brazilian Portuguese usage differs from Standard Portuguese usage. The differences include the placement of
clitic pronouns and, in Brazil, the use of subject pronouns as objects in the third person. Nonstandard verb inflections are also common in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese.
Affirmation and negation Spoken Portuguese rarely uses the affirmation adverb
sim ("yes") in informal speech. Instead, the usual reply is a repetition of the verb of the question (as in the
Celtic languages):
BP: :
— Você foi na/à/pra biblioteca? :
— Fui. or :
— Tu foste/foi na/à/pra biblioteca? :
— Fui. Translation :"Have you gone to the library yet?" :"Yes, I went there." In BP, it is common to form a
yes–no question as a declarative sentence followed by the
tag question não é? ("isn't it?"), contracted in informal speech to
né? (compare English "He is a teacher, isn't he?"). The affirmative answer to such a question is a repetition of the verb
é:
BP: —
Ele não fez o que devia, né? ("He didn't do what he should have, did he?") —
É. ("Right, he didn't.") or —
Ela já foi atriz, né? ("She had already been an actress, hadn't she?") —
É. ("She already had.") Or –
É, sim, ela já foi. (If a longer answer is preferred.) It is also common to negate statements twice for emphasis, with
não ("no") before and after the verb:
BP: :
— Você fala inglês? :
— Não falo, não. :"Do you speak English?" :"I don't speak [it], no." Sometimes, even a triple negative is possible: :
— Você fala inglês? :
— Não. Não falo, não :"Do you speak English?" :"No. I don't speak it, no." In some regions, the first "não" of a "não...não" pair is pronounced . In some cases, the redundancy of the first
não results in its omission, which makes BP a likely example of
Jespersen's Cycle:
BP:
— Você fala inglês? :
— Falo não. ("[I] speak not")
Translation :"Do you speak English?" :"No, I don't."
Imperative Standard Portuguese forms a command according to the
grammatical person of the subject (who is ordered to do the action) by using either the imperative form of the verb or the present subjunctive. Thus, one should use different inflections according to the pronoun used as the subject:
tu ('you', the grammatical second person with the imperative form) or
você ('you', the grammatical third person with the present subjunctive): :
Tu és burro, cala a boca! (cala-te) :
Você é burro, cale a boca! (cale-se) :"You are stupid, shut your mouth! (shut up)" Currently, several dialects of BP have largely lost the second-person pronouns, but even they use the second-person imperative in addition to the third-person present subjunctive form that should be used with
você: :BP:
Você é burro, cale a boca! OR :BP:
Você é burro, cala a boca! (considered grammatically incorrect, but completely dominant in informal language) Brazilian Portuguese uses the second-person imperative forms even when referring to
você and not
tu, in the case of the verb
ser 'to be (permanently)' and
estar 'to be (temporarily)', the second-person imperative
sê and
está are never used; the third-person subjunctive forms
seja and
esteja may be used instead. The negative command forms use the
subjunctive present tense forms of the verb. However, as for the second person forms, Brazilian Portuguese traditionally does not use the subjunctive-derived ones in spoken language. Instead, they employ the imperative forms: "Não anda," rather than the grammatically correct "Não andes." As for other grammatical persons, there is no such phenomenon because both the positive imperative and the negative imperative forms are from their respective present tense forms in the subjunctive mood:
Não jogue papel na grama (Don't throw paper on the grass);
Não fume (Don't smoke).
Deictics In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, the first two adjectives/pronouns usually merge: :
Esse 'this (one)' [near the speaker] / 'that (one)' [near the addressee] :
Aquele 'that (one)' [away from both] Example: :
Essa é minha camiseta nova. (BP) :This is my new T-shirt. Perhaps as a means of avoiding or clarifying some ambiguities created by the fact that "este" ( > ) and "esse" have merged into the same word, informal BP often uses the demonstrative pronoun with some adverb that indicates its placement in relation to the addressee: if there are two skirts in a room and one says,
Pega essa saia para mim (Take this skirt for me), there may be some doubt about which of them must be taken so one may say
Pega essa aí (Take this one there near you") in the original sense of the use of "essa", or
Pega essa saia aqui (Take this one here).
Personal pronouns and possessives Tu and você In many dialects of BP,
você (formal "you") replaces
tu (informal "you"). The object pronoun, however, is still
te (). Also, other forms such as
teu (possessive),
ti (postprepositional), and
contigo ("with you") are still common in most regions of Brazil, especially in areas in which
tu is still frequent. Hence, the combination of object
te with subject
você in informal BP:
eu te disse para você ir (I told you that you should go). In addition, in all the country, the imperative forms may also be the same as the formal second-person forms, but it is argued by some that it is the third-person singular indicative which doubles as the imperative:
fala o que você fez instead of
fale o que você fez ("say what you did"). In areas in which
você has largely replaced
tu, the forms
ti/te and
contigo may be replaced by
você and
com você. Therefore, either
você (following the verb) or
te (preceding the verb) can be used as the object pronoun in informal BP. A speaker may thus end up saying "I love you" in two ways:
eu amo você or
eu te amo. In parts of the Northeast, most specifically in the states of
Piauí and
Pernambuco, it is also common to use the indirect object pronoun
lhe as a second-person object pronoun:
eu lhe amo. In parts of the South, in most of the North and most of the Northeast, and in the city of
Santos, the distinction between semi-formal 'você' and familiar 'tu' is still maintained, and object and possessive pronouns pattern likewise. In the
Paraná state capital,
Curitiba, 'tu' is not generally used. In
Rio de Janeiro and minor parts of the Northeast (interior of some states and some speakers from the coast), both
tu and
você (and associated object and possessive pronouns) are used interchangeably with little or no difference (sometimes even in the same sentence). In
Salvador,
tu is never used and is replaced by
você. Most Brazilians who use
tu use it with the third-person verb:
tu vai ao banco. "Tu" with the second-person verb can still be found in
Maranhão,
Pernambuco,
Piauí,
Santa Catarina, and in the
Amazofonia dialect region (e.g.
Manaus,
Belém). A few cities in
Rio Grande do Sul (but in the rest of the state speakers may or may not use it in more formal speech), mainly near the border with
Uruguay, have a slightly different pronunciation in some instances (
tu vieste becomes
tu viesse), which is also present in
Santa Catarina and
Pernambuco. In the states of
Pará and Amazonas,
tu is used much more often than
você and is always accompanied by a second-person verb ("tu queres", tu "viste"). In
São Paulo, the use of "tu" in print and conversation is no longer very common and is replaced by "você". However, São Paulo is now home to many immigrants of Northeastern origin, who may employ "tu" quite often in their everyday speech.
Você is predominant in most of the Southeastern and Center Western regions; it is almost entirely prevalent in the states of
Minas Gerais (apart from portions of the countryside, such as the region of São João da Ponte, where "tu" is also present) and
Espírito Santo, but "tu" is frequent in
Santos and all coastal region of São Paulo state as well as some cities in the countryside. In most of Brazil "você" is often reduced to even more contracted forms, resulting
ocê (mostly in the
Caipira dialect) and, especially,
cê because
vo- is an unstressed syllable and so is dropped in rapid speech.
2nd person singular conjugation in Brazilian Portuguese The table for 2nd person singular conjugation in Brazilian Portuguese is presented below:
Third-person direct object pronouns In spoken informal registers of BP, the third-person object pronouns 'o', 'a', 'os', and 'as' are virtually nonexistent and are simply left out or, when necessary and usually only when referring to people, replaced by stressed subject pronouns like
ele "he" or
isso "that":
Eu vi ele "I saw him" rather than
Eu o vi.
Seu and dele When
você is strictly a second-person pronoun, the use of possessive
seu/sua may turn some phrases quite ambiguous since one would wonder whether seu/sua refers to the second person
você or to the third person
ele/ela. BP thus tends to use the third-person possessive 'seu' to mean "your" since
você is a third-person pronoun and uses 'dele', 'dela', 'deles', and 'delas' ("of him/her/them" and placed after the noun) as third-person possessive forms. If no ambiguity could arise (especially in narrative texts),
seu is also used to mean 'his' or 'hers'. Both forms ('seu' or 'dele(s) /dela(s)') are considered grammatically correct in Brazilian Portuguese.
Definite article before possessive In Portuguese, one may or may not include the definite article before a
possessive pronoun (
meu livro or
o meu livro, for instance). The variants of use in each dialect of Portuguese are mostly a matter of preference: it does not usually mean a dialect completely abandoned either form. In Southeastern Brazilian Portuguese, especially in the standard dialects of the cities of
Rio de Janeiro and
São Paulo, the definite article is normally used as in Portugal, but many speakers do not use it at the beginning of the sentence or in titles:
Minha novela,
Meu tio matou um cara. In Northeastern BP dialects and in Central and Northern parts of the state of
Rio de Janeiro (starting from
Niterói), rural parts of
Minas Gerais, and all over
Espírito Santo State, speakers tend to but do not always drop the
definite article, but both
esse é o meu gato and
esse é meu gato are likely in speech. Formal written Brazilian Portuguese tends, however, to omit the definite article in accordance with prescriptive grammar rules derived from Classical Portuguese even if the alternative form is also considered correct, but many teachers consider it inelegant.
Syntax Some of the examples on the right side of the table below are colloquial or regional in Brazil. Literal translations are provided to illustrate how word order changes between varieties. Word order in the first Brazilian Portuguese example is frequent in European Portuguese. Similar to the subordinate clauses like
Sabes que eu te amo "You know
that I love you," but not in simple sentences like "I love you." However, in Portugal, an object pronoun would never be placed at the start of a sentence, as in the second example. The example in the bottom row of the table, with its deletion of "redundant" inflections, is considered ungrammatical, but it is nonetheless dominant in Brazil throughout all social classes.
Use of prepositions Just as in the case of English, whose various dialects sometimes use different prepositions with the same verbs or nouns (
stand in/on line, in/on the street), BP usage sometimes requires prepositions that would not be normally used in Portuguese for the same context.
Chamar de Chamar 'call' is normally used with the preposition
de in BP, especially when it means 'to describe someone as': :
Chamei ele de ladrão. (BP) :I called him a thief.
Em with verbs of movement When movement to a place is described, BP uses
em (contracted with an article, if necessary): :
Fui na praça. (BP) :I went to the square. [temporarily] In BP, the preposition
para can also be used with such verbs with no difference in meaning: :
Fui para a praça. (BP) :I went to the square. [definitively] == Dialects ==