Portuguese is the official and national language of Brazil, the largest country in Latin America. A total of 300 million people speak Portuguese worldwide. In addition to Portugal, it is also an official language of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Ten times the number of enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil as the United States, making it today the largest country of African ancestry outside of Africa (50.7% of the population identifies as Black or of mixed ethnicity). The most sizeable Japanese, Lebanese and Syrian communities outsider of their origin countries can also be found in Brazil, in addition to major European-descended populations.
Brazilian Indigenous populations play a crucial role as guardians of the planet, utilizing ancestral ecological knowledge to protect biodiversity and manage natural resources sustainably. Their stewardship of Brazil’s diverse biomes—including the Amazon rain forest, the tropical savannah known as the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest, among others—plays a vital role in combating climate change.
These populations, their cultures, languages and ways of knowing have profoundly transformed the colonial language brought to the territory at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not only in Brazil but for the entire Portuguese-speaking world.
Portuguese at U-M
Learn the language through a comprehensive program featuring beginner, intermediate, and advanced level courses that engage, through multimedia, with Brazil’s diverse sociopolitical and cultural landscape emphasizing gender-diverse language and content reflecting the country’s racial and ethnic complexities. FLAS-eligible at the advanced level, these courses are an essential resource for students interested in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages, Latin American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, the Environment and Sustainability and so much more. Brazil is such a vast territory that Brazilians jokingly state that even Deus é brasileiro (God is Brazilian)!
Advanced Portuguese Instructor Ryan B. Morrison, the 2024-2025 Afro-Brazilian Studies Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow, is a permanent resident of Brazil with native-level proficiency in Portuguese and over a decade of teaching experience. He researches and writes on Black consciousness, cultural studies and literature in Brazil and the Southern Cone and received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023.
