&_160;Angola
&_160;Brazil
&_160;Cape Verde
&_160;East Timor
&_160;Guinea-Bissau
&_160;Macau
&_160;Mozambique
&_160;Portugal
&_160;São Tomé and PríncipeToday it is one of the world's major languages, ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (between 191 and 230 million). It is the language of about half of South America's population, 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 nine countries (see the table on the right), also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in Macau and Tetum in East Timor. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, California and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada.
In various aspects, the system of sounds in Portuguese is more similar to the phonologies of Catalan or French than, say, those of Spanish or Italian. Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes once called Portuguese "the sweet language",[7] Lope de Vega referred to it as "suave" [8] while Brazilian writer Olavo Bilac poetically described it as a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela "the last flower of Latium, wild and beautiful". Portuguese is also termed "the language of Camões," after one of Portugal's best known literary figures, Luís Vaz de Camões.
Today, Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Brazil (190.6 million)[9], Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal (10.6 million) [10], São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique.[11] It is also one of the official languages of the special administrative region of Macau (with Chinese) and East Timor, (with Tetum). It is the language of most of the population in Portugal (100%), Brazil (100%), São Tomé and Príncipe (99.8%) and Angola (80%), and is the most widely spoken language in Mozambique (40%), though only 6.5% are native speakers. No data are available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, and the monolingual population speaks Cape Verdean Creole.[12]
