Portuguese is the official language of several countries besides Portugal, including Angola, Brazil and Mozambique. This global reach – a consequence of Portugal’s colonial past – ensures that Portugal remains the sixth most spoken language in the world today, and the most popular in the Southern hemisphere. There are, approximately, around 240 million speakers of Portuguese across the world.
The Portuguese alphabet (European, South American and African territories) contain the same 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet as in English. The standard Portuguese alphabet thus consists of the letters A to Z however, the following letters can be found with accents and diacritics are used namely Áá, Ââ, Ãã, Àà, Çç, Éé, Êê, Íí, Óó, Ôô, Õõ, Úú. yet they are not independent letters in the alphabet.
