Despite being one of the top 10 most spoken languages in the world, just 5% of Portuguese speakers reside in Portugal.
In the early 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese language spread to numerous nations in Asia, America, and Africa. The main language of exchange between local Europeans and the authorities was Portuguese.
Therefore, Portuguese was also used by Roman Catholic missionaries in Asia. In some parts of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and Malaysia, Portuguese is still extensively spoken.
Ten nations and territories, including Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde, and So Tomé and Prncipe, have Portuguese as their official language.
With 211.2 million speakers, Brazil has the largest Portuguese-speaking population in the world. There are a few places with sizable Portuguese-speaking populations, but no other country in the Americas even comes close to that number.
There are 693,000 native Portuguese speakers in the United States and 222,000 in Canada. A few South American nations, including Brazil, Argentina (58,000), Paraguay (235,000), Uruguay (30,600), and Venezuela, also have Portuguese-speaking populations (254,000).
Portuguese is a language that is widely spoken in Africa, largely as a result of colonialism. There are around 18 million native speakers in Angola and 13 million in Mozambique. Additionally, there are a few hundred thousand speakers in South Africa and Guinea-Bissau.
Portuguese-speaking people are also widely spread throughout Asia and Oceania. India and Japan each have close to 300,000 speakers, and Australia has little around 49,000.
The only remaining Portuguese-speaking nation in Southeast Asia is Timor-Leste. There are 1.3 million people living in Timor Leste, and 5,600 of them speak Portuguese. Following their occupation of Timor Leste in the 1600s, the Portuguese established themselves in this state. In 1975, Portugal legally left the area.
Timor Leste is home to a wide variety of tongues and civilizations. There are two official ones there. Portuguese is the second official language of the nation. The first official language is tetun. 63,000 people are thought to speak Tetun as their mother tongue. In East Timor, more than 30 indigenous languages are also spoken.
Source: Babbel.com, CCJK.com, Seasia.co
