There is no frañol or aleñol.
On the contrary, there is a portuñol that circulates happily through the Portuguese cities.
His roots have even recently opened the door to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy: "He speaks with a Portuguese base that incorporates numerous lexical, grammatical and phonetic elements of Spanish."
In a way, Portuñol is what the Portuguese who do not master Spanish but try to speak, as well as the Spaniards who do not master Portuguese but try.
The
Demolinguistics study of Spanish in Portugal
, prepared by professors from the University of Lisbon, José María Santos Rovira and Celso Serrano Lucas, offers a portrait of the current situation of Spanish in the neighboring country.
It is the third volume of a scientific project promoted by the Instituto Cervantes and the Universities of Zurich and Heidelberg, after those dedicated to Germany and Switzerland, to assess the status of Spanish in Europe.
In the presentation of the work at the Instituto Cervantes in Lisbon, Santos Rovira defended the closeness between the Portuguese and Spanish languages as a wealth.
“The linguistic affinity is very positive.
For those who don't believe it, I invite you to try communicating in China for a while, where there is no language affinity”, ironized the professor, who lived in China before settling in Lisbon.
These are some highlights of the study.
One in 10 Portuguese speaks Spanish
.
There are over a million Spanish speakers, which represents 10% of the population of Portugal.
Of them, only 4% are native speakers and another 10% study the language.
85% consider themselves to be speakers of limited competence, a heterogeneous sack that includes people with a high level but who do not consider themselves native speakers and with a more limited level but who are no longer studying the language.
According to the authors, the linguistic affinity “favors the approach to the Spanish language by the Portuguese citizen”.
Boom and break in school.
For 150 years, Santos Rovira recalled, Spanish was absent from Portuguese schools, where English, French and German were offered, the three economic and cultural powers of the 19th century.
"Spanish entered experimentally in three schools and with 35 students in 1991," he explained during the presentation of the study in Lisbon at a ceremony attended by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero.
In 1997 it was introduced as an optional language for a thousand students.
From then on, there was an explosion: students increased to 120,000 in 2011. Growth then slowed down because legislation was introduced that hinders the supply of foreign languages if the teachers did not have full schedules.
“This hurt Spanish teachers the most because they were the youngest and most precarious.
Only 25% were civil servants compared to 90% of English teachers”, compared Santos Rovira.
In 2020 almost 100,000 people studied Spanish as a foreign language at some level of the educational system.
In high school, it is the second most studied language after English.
Sixth language of immigration
.
Portugal has the peculiarity of being both a country of emigrants and immigrants.
The arrival of foreigners has grown rapidly in the last three decades.
Portuguese is the main language of immigration (244,473 speakers in 2020, according to the study) due to the arrival of residents from countries that were Portuguese colonies in the past, such as Brazil, which contributes almost a quarter of immigrants.
The other most widely spoken languages are, in order, English, Romanian, French, Ukrainian and Spanish.
Most of the 28,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants come from Spain (56.5%) and Venezuela (23.36%).
Erasmus and higher cycles.
In January 2020 there were 5,600 students studying Spanish at a university or polytechnic institute in Portugal.
It is the second foreign language, after English, with more university students.
This interest can also be seen in Erasmus: Spain is the country most chosen by Portuguese university students who participate in the European programme.
As a negative element, the authors highlight the non-existence of a higher degree specialized in Spanish language or literature.
“There are degrees in which Spanish has a certain weight in the curriculum, but it is always subordinated to another main linguistic specialization, Portuguese, in most cases”, they state.
Laws and the future.
The entry into the European Union stimulated relations between the two Iberian countries.
Both the economy and culture, which became closer from then on, help the spread of a language.
Celso Serrano recalled that his Spanish students were enthusiastic viewers of series such as
La casa de papel
and, what is more surprising due to the distance in time,
Verano azul
.
“Any cultural product that is exported becomes a springboard for the language,” he said.
In their conclusions, the authors point out that Spanish "has room to continue growing in Portugal, with great opportunities at a cultural and educational level, but also economically."
However, they point to official language policies as the main barrier at present: "At all levels of education, Spanish has room to continue growing, but it will only do so if more positions are created for teachers."
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