Portuñol (Spanish spelling) or Portunhol (Portuguese spelling) () is a portmanteau of the words portugués/português ("Portuguese") and español/espanhol ("Spanish"), and is the name often given to any non-systematic mixture of Portuguese and Spanish (this sense should not be confused with the dialects of the Portuguese language spoken in northern Uruguay by the Brazilian border, known by several names, among them Portuñol). Close examination reveals it to be "a polyvalent term (portuñol/portunhol) used to describe a wide range of phenomena, including spontaneous contact vernaculars in border regions, errors produced by speakers attempting to speak the second language (L2) correctly, and idiosyncratic invented speech designed to facilitate communication between the two languages." When speakers of one of the languages attempt to speak the other language, there is often interference from the native language, which causes the phenomenon of code-switching to occur. It is possible to conduct a moderately fluent conversation in this way because Portuguese and Spanish are closely related Romance languages. They have almost identical syntactic structures, as well as overlapping lexicons due to cognates, which means that a single macro-grammar is produced when the two mix. and most of its neighboring countries whose official languages are Spanish. Because Portuñol is a spontaneous register resulting from the occasional mixing of Spanish and Portuguese, it is highly diverse;
|Hoy me veo delante de su mirada de muerto, este hombre que me hace bailar castañuelas en la cama, que me hace sufrir, que me hace, que me ha construido de dolor y sangre, la sangre que vertió mi vida amarga. Desde sus hombros, mi destino igual aquel hecho de un puñal en la clave derecha del corazón. Ahora en este momento, yo no sé qué hablar con su cara dura, rojos/purpurados los ojos soterrados, estos que eran mis ojos.
|Today I see myself before his gaze of the dead, this man who makes me dance castanets in bed, who makes me suffer, who makes me, who has built me in pain and blood, the blood that poured my life bitter. From his shoulders, my destiny like that made by a dagger in the right key of the heart. Now at this moment, I do not know what to speak with his hard face, red/purple eyes buried, these which were my eyes.
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See also
- Castrapo
- Cocoliche
- Differences between Spanish and Portuguese
- Spanglish
- Surzhyk
- Svorsk
- Trasianka