Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Brazinglish: Por Frombrazil
Brazinglish: Por Frombrazil
Por frombrazil
Brazilian Portuguese has taken on so many words from English that some
don’t just have different pronunciations. They have developed wonderful new
meanings.
By Claire Rigby
Soon after taking my first steps towards speaking Portuguese years ago, I got
talking to the owner of a small-town language school in Minas Gerais. Happy
to be speaking English to a live specimen in the wild, she was explaining her
marketing strategy for the school when we hit a brick wall. ‘Outchydoor’, she
told me. She was wondering whether to advertise on one. What?
OUTCHYDOOR, she said again, looking irritated that her English was letting
her down. Spelling it out didn’t help (‘outdoor’), but an explanation of the
concept finally cracked it.
‘Billboard’. It was a billboard, and my first contact with the rich vein of
English loanwords in Portuguese. Outdoor is still my favourite, and one of the
many loanwords that grab a word by the scruff of the neck and haul it in,
almost severing it from its original meaning.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of English etymology knows about its
similar cut-and-paste background, and its layers of language from successive
invading tribes – Picts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans – to the extent
that Celtic British, the only language that might have had a claim to being
indigenous to Britain, is almost completely absent from modern-day English.
Some of the best words are completely assimilated: lanche, from the
American word ‘luncheonette’, which has broken away
from lanchonete (snackbar) to mean ‘snack’. Blecaute, pronounced bleck-
outchy, means power cut; and the best of them all: X. As in, ‘xis’, the letter X,
correctly pronounced (shees). It sounds like the English word ‘cheese’ to a
Brazilian ear, so ‘cheeseburger’ is transliterated as X-burguer, and from there
strikes out into constructions like X-salada and the majestic X-tudo – a
cheeseburger with the full works (‘tudo’).
At Time Out São Paulo, the office is like a language-lab petri dish, with words
swapped in and out of each language all day long as we pull together our
monthly magazine and website in both languages. It’s fascinating to see
people join the team, improve their second language in leaps and bounds – we
speak roughly half English and half Portuguese in the office – and then
descend into a world of hybrid language. Like good journalists, we try not to
mangle the words too much; but where borrowing and lending them is
concerned, it’s a free-for-all.