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In order to be clear enough, I would say that I am a "European Portuguese native speaker" rather than a "Portuguese native speaker". - As a translator, I am expected to let potential clients know my native language as well as (in this case) its variant.

My question is:

Is it correct to add the variant "European" to the expression?

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Yes, I believe that is the normal way of referring to that variety of Portuguese: European Portuguese (as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese or African Portuguese). If you think 'European Portuguese speaker' is a bit of a mouthful, you can always say 'a speaker of European Portuguese'.

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  • This is correct. Moreover, these are often abbreviated in English-language text as “EP” for European Portuguese and “BP” for Brazilian Portuguese. See Portuguese Language for further questions relating to these customs.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Jun 10, 2018 at 1:29
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I believe that, if you are from Portugal, you can just say "Portuguese". Brazil was colonized by Portugal so that's why we speak Portuguese in Brazil. I'm Brazilian and I always emphasize that I speak "Brazilian Portuguese" because, even though we (Brazilians and Portuguese) can understand each other really well, there are subtle differences in both languages, i.e., they are not significant differences, it is practically the exact same language, we do have different slangs and we phrase some sentences in a different way with a different pronunciation.

I guess it is more of a technical matter of who came first that should hold the right to state the name of the language without further specification of the region, as a Brazilian I've inherited the language and created a variation of it, hence, I speak "Brazilian Portuguese" and people from Portugal speak "Portuguese".

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    What's your take on "British English", then?
    – user28567
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 14:25
  • Yeah, I guess I should've mentioned that as well: In that case, IMHO, there's a the "popularity" factor, so both North American English and British English have practically the same popular awareness towards "who speaks what", if you ask around, there's a high chance you might find someone that doesn't know what is the language spoken in Brazil but you would hardly find someone that doesn't know what is the official language in the US or the UK. To be honest, I find kind of silly a few differences, e.g., center and centre, analyze and analyse. I feel that most of the US spelling is correct.
    – theMarceloR
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 14:47
  • Thank you for your comments! After editing my question to ask what I first intended to, and reading your answers I decided to go for Peter's suggestion: "I am a native speaker of European Portuguese". Thank you again and sorry for any inconvenience.
    – isabel
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 16:01
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For what it's worth, I've never met anyone from Portugal. But I've met (and am related to) people from Brazil and US people related to people from Brazil, and unrelated people who learned to speak the language spoken in Brazil (one of my grandsons, for example). Without exception these people refer to the language they speak as "Portuguese", and almost never qualify it with "Brazilian".

Given that 90% of all Portuguese speakers live in Brazil, it would seem much more reasonable for speakers in Portugal to qualify their speech (as "European") rather than Brazilian Portuguese speakers to qualify theirs.

Thus I do believe you should probably tell others that you are a speaker of European Portuguese.

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I believe that, if you are from Portugal, you can just say "Portuguese". Brazil was colonized by Portugal so that's why we speak Portuguese in Brazil. I'm Brazilian and I always emphasize that I speak "Brazilian Portuguese"

I'm a little bit curious about what you said @heMarceloR, because I'm Brazilian and I've never had to say "Brazilian Portuguese" to someone, actually, when you are filling your profile in some website, 99% of the cases you see something like: Portuguese | Portugal Portuguese. A good example of that is the Google translator, is there a way to set the Portuguese from Portugal? I don't think so. Given that, when someone says "Portuguese", most of the people are going to associate it with Brazil. I don't know why you've put the "colonized" matter in your response, it's like comparing England with US. When someone says: I speak English, you will associate it with the US, and it's ok.

Answering the question, you can say: Europen Portuguese or Portugal Portuguese. If you want to say Portuguese from Brazil, you can just say: Portuguese.

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  • Not that this has much to do with English, but you will find that outside of Brazil your language will be called “Brazilian Portuguese” and not “Portuguese”.
    – gnasher729
    Commented Sep 12, 2021 at 22:13
  • Really? It is really interesting, I've been working for some European and American companies in the last few years as I've visited some countries and I've never heard it @gnasher729. Thank you for sharing it.
    – Juan Fontes
    Commented Sep 12, 2021 at 23:39
  • In the Americas Brazilian Portuguese is the default meant by "Portuguese" just as "Spanish" means Latin American Spanish. In Europe, particularly western Europe where there are more Portuguese people and people often go to Portugal on vacation, it's likely to be different. Not sure about Asia (where Brazilian may be default) or Africa (where there are other varieties of Portuguese).
    – Stuart F
    Commented Sep 13, 2021 at 10:04

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