Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 - Precedents

Precedents

Until the beginning of the 20th century, in Portugal as in Brazil, an orthography was used that, by rule, relied on Greek or Latin etymology to form words, e.g. pharmacia ("pharmacy"), lyrio ("lily"), and diccionário ("dictionary"), among others.

In 1911, following the establishment of the Portuguese republic, a wide orthographic reform was adopted — the Orthographic Reform of 1911 — which completely modified the face of the written language, bringing it closer to contemporary trends. However, this reform was made without any agreement with Brazil, leaving both countries with two entirely different orthographies: Portugal with its reformed orthography, Brazil with its traditional orthography (called pseudo-etimológica, "pseudo-etymological").

As time passed, the Science Academy of Lisbon and the Brazilian Academy of Letters led successive attempts to establish a common spelling between both countries. In 1931, the first agreement was reached, however, as vocabularies published in 1940 (in Portugal) and in 1943 (in Brazil) continued to contain some divergences, a new meeting was held that created the Orthographic Agreement of 1945. This agreement became law in Portugal, by Decree 35.288/45. In Brazil, the Agreement of 1945 was approved by Decree-Law 8.286/45, but it was never ratified by the National Congress and was repealed by Law 2.623/55, leaving Brazilians with the rules of the 1943 agreement.

A new agreement between Portugal and Brazil — effective in 1971 in Brazil and in 1973 in Portugal — brought the orthographies slightly closer, removing the written accents responsible for 70% of the divergences between the two official systems and those that marked the unstressed syllable in words derived with the suffix -mente or beginning with -z-, e.g. sòmente (somente, "only"), sòzinho (sozinho, "alone"). Other attempts failed in 1975 — in part due to the period of political upheaval in Portugal, the Revolutionary Process in Progress (PREC) — and in 1986 — due to the reaction elicited in both countries by the suppression of written accents in paroxytone words.

However, according to proponents of reform, the fact that the persistence of two orthographies in the Portuguese language — the Luso-African and the Brazilian — impedes the trans-Atlantic unity of Portuguese and diminishes its prestige in the world — was expressed by the "Preliminary Basis for Unified Portuguese Orthography" in 1988, addressing criticisms directed toward at the proposal of 1986 and leading to the Orthographic Agreement of 1990.