Tuesday, September 13, 2016

6. Portuguese


The Portuguese language has 203 million speakers, but ironically, the population of Portugal is just under 11 million. As a result, the global "Lusophone" population is being enormously boosted by Brazil's 187 million. 

Over all, both the Portuguese and Spanish "loanwords" are some times tricky to differentiate due to the many similarities between them. But, according to the OED, Portuguese is responsible for the words marmalade ( year 1480 ), pagoda ( year 1582 ), commando ( year 1791 ), cuspidor ( year 1779 ), and piranha ( year 1710 ).

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