Portuguese Dialects - Notable Features of Some Dialects - Conservative

Conservative

• In some regions of northern Portugal and Brazil, the digraph ou still denotes a falling diphthong, although it has been monophthongized to by most speakers of Portuguese.

• In the dialects of Alto-Minho and Trás-os-Montes (northern Portugal), the digraph ch still denotes the affricate /tʃ/, as in Galicia, although for most speakers it has merged with /ʃ/.

• Some dialects of northern Portugal still contrast the predorsodental sibilants c/ç /s/ and z /z/ with apicoalveolar sibilants s(s) /s̺/ and s /z̺/, with minimal pairs such as passo /pas̺u/ "step" and paço /pasu/ "palace" or coser /kuz̺eɾ/ "to sew" and cozer /kuzeɾ/ "to cook", which are homophones in most dialects. In the other dialects of northern Portugal that have lost this distinction, one finds the apicoalveolar sibilants instead of the predorsodental fricatives that are found in all southern dialects of Portugal as well as in Brazil. In these dialects, they also appear in syllable codas, instead of the realizations that can be observed in all southern dialects.

• In northern Portugal, the pronoun vós and its associated verb forms are still in use.

• In Alentejo (southern Portugal), one finds word-final where standard EP has, a feature shared with BP.

• Also in Brazil and Alentejo, progressive constructions are formed with the gerund form of verbs, instead of a followed by the infinitive that one finds in most dialects of Portugal: está chovendo vs. está a chover ("it's raining").

• In Brazil, original voiced intervocalic stops are still pronounced as such, e.g., instead of the normal Portugal pronunciation, .

• In Brazil, all five vowels are usually pronounced clearly in unstressed pretonic syllables, the same as in stressed syllables, while in Portugal they are generally reduced to . That being said, some words in some Brazilian accents (esp. in Rio) have pretonic raised to .