The taste of Portuguese spoken in Brazil – 05/10/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The last May 5th, when the World Portuguese Language Day was celebrated, was the cue for another series of repetitions of a sickening cliché of great success in Portugal: “Brazilians speak Portuguese with sugar”.

In the cheesy buzzwords department, it’s one of the benign ones. It is usually used in our defense, so to speak, to point out what would be sweet and seductive in a speech full of grinning vowels and curvy gerunds.

If the skirmishes between Lusitanian Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese have been making a lot of smoke there in recent years, fueled by factors such as resistance to the Orthographic Agreement, mass immigration and the success of youtubers, “Portuguese with sugar” seems like an attempt —paternalistic, but you can’t have everything—to sweeten bitterness.

Nice or not, it’s a buzzword. From coming across it so often —even used with comical solemnity by those who believe it enunciates a new and brilliant insight—, I became intrigued. Also worried: if the Portuguese spoken by 80% of the world’s speakers is so sugary, our language is in danger of being diabetic.

I doubt that such a high level of glucose was in the plans of the Portuguese Eça de Queirós when he laid the foundations for this commonplace in the satirical magazine “As Farpas”, in 1872, by mentioning “that strange language, which sounds like Portuguese — with sugar”.

Yes, the great writer was referring to the Portuguese spoken in the New World. The text drew a caricature of the “Brazilian”, a ridiculous type of nouveau riche — at first the portrait of a dull Portuguese who had made his fortune in Brazil and returned, but sufficiently ambiguous for Brazilians to be included in the picture.

And they saw each other. There were protests, reprisals against the Portuguese living here, almost a diplomatic incident — the complete circus, because the skirmishes come from far away. Eça’s article is old news, but from him, now with a positive sign, “Portuguese with sugar”. Why?

Does Brazilian Portuguese sound mellow to Portuguese ears? That may be so, but contemporary Portuguese literary prose has a much greater tolerance for poetic-sentimental flourishes — here we entertain vices of a different order, but a certain bitter flavor has prevailed.

Maybe “Portuguese with sugar” is a historical reference? One of the main products, alongside the gold with which the South American colony enriched Portugal until the beginning of the 19th century, as a result of the work of enslaved people, sugar would have in some way left residues in the language spoken in the land of the mills.

If the contribution of the peoples brought by force from Africa, especially those from the Bantu linguistic group, was in fact huge in the formation of our language, white sugar is not the association that scholars of the matter prefer.

Bahian professor Yeda Pessoa de Castro, the greatest Brazilian authority on Africanisms, gave the suggestive title of “Camões com Dendê” (Topbooks) to the book in which she condenses the studies of a lifetime.

Palm oil, of African origin, is slightly sweetened, but it is more than that. Red and dense, it can be found in a number of dishes typical of Afro-Brazilian cuisine —salty and, almost always, also spicy.

So here is the proposal to update the Etian cliché: Brazilian Portuguese does not only have sugar, but also palm oil, salt, pepper, garlic, annatto, tucupi and cachaça, among other ingredients not yet properly catalogued.

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