Cyphernaut - Portuguese Alphabet

Portuguese is a language that is similar to other Romance languages like Spanish, French and Italian. If you speak Spanish, you'll see many similar words and phrases in Portuguese. It is believed to be derived from Vulgar Latin and has approximately 240 million speakers worldwide. It is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, and East Timor. There are two main dialects: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.

This is a Flash guide for browsing the Portuguese alphabet. The Portuguese alphabet uses the Latin alphabet and consists of 21 consonants and 5 vowels, although K, W and Y are used only in foreign words and usually not considered part of the alphabet. In the browser, vowels are indicated with a reddish tint. Vowel variations(i.e. vowels with diacritic marks like graves, tildes, etc...) will be explained in the notes section of each vowel. Generally speaking if a tilde appears over a vowel, it is pronounced nasally. For instance, if you see a word ending in -ção, this is pronounced similarly but not exactly like the Spanish suffix -ción . The c with a cedilla, ç, is pronounced like s in set. So nação is pronounced like na-sow[ng], where the [ng] is the nasal sound. The Portuguese word for dog, cão is pronounced kow[ng]. A vowel with an acute, ´, over it is called open. A vowel with a circumflex, ^, is closed. A vowel with a grave, `, is pronounced the same as if it didn't have a mark. The diaeresis over the u, ü, is used sometimes in Brazil to indicate that the preceding q or g is pronounced like kw or gw.