History 

Brazil was officially discovered in 1500 by the Portuguese, who landed in the Northeast of Brazil and started going south over the years. However, along our colonization, there were many other European countries that settled in different parts of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, for instance, had a major influence by the French since 1565, you can notice that not only by its architecture, but also by how they speak. ‘Cariocas’ (natives from Rio) pronounce their ‘s’s like ‘x’s and their ‘r’s have a different sound. If you follow soccer or MMA, you can check this out by listening to their English interviews 😉

In the South of Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy had a huge influence on their colonization. Some Brazilians, to this day, still speak these languages, some of them barely speak Portuguese because they live in small villages. However, in terms of Brazil, the south is the most ‘European’,  in terms of style, posture, culture and specially in how they speak Portuguese. In Sao Paulo, people say they speak like they are singing, but their slang and the way they pronounce words are the most notorious differences.

Here in Sao Paulo we have two types of Portuguese, the one from Sao Paulo city, which is very clear and very precise and the one from the countryside. The one from Sao Paulo doesn’t have many interesting facts, since it is very close to the norm, but the countryside one is very interesting, because it wasn’t influenced by colonization, but rather, from the indigenous tribes that lived here years ago. One of the biggest tribes, the ‘Tupis’, didn’t have an ‘r’ sound in their language, so when they learned Portuguese, they didn’t pronounce it (most verbs in Portuguese in the infinitive form end with ‘r’, such as pular, correr, comer, andar, subir, etc) and because of that, nowadays we pronounce those verbs without the ‘r’ (pula, corre, anda, subi).