Reforms of Portuguese Orthography - A Timeline of Spelling Reforms

A Timeline of Spelling Reforms

• 1911: First spelling reform in Portugal.
• 1931: Orthographic agreement between Portugal and Brazil. Silent s abolished from words such as sciência, scena, scéptico, etc., and spellings like dir-se há and amar-te hei changed to dir-se-á and amar-te-ei.
• 1937: First proposal of orthographic reform in Brazil is mentioned by the Constitution but not enforced.
• 1943: First orthographic reform of Brazil is delineated in the Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa, by the Academia Brasileira de Letras.
• 1945: Sweeping spelling reform in Portugal eliminates the trema, and differential circumflex accents in most pairs of homographs such as acêrto and acerto, cêrca and cerca, côr and cor, fôra and fora, dêsse and desse, and so on.
• 1946: The Constitution of Brazil makes the orthographic reform of 1943 official and mandates that all books published in the country use the official spelling.
• 1971: Sweeping spelling reform in Brazil eliminates the trema in hiatuses, most differential circumflexes, and accent marks on vowels with secondary stressed syllables in compounds, such as ràpidamente, ùltimamente, cortêsmente, cafèzinho, and so on. This reform was mockingly nicknamed the "Remington Reform" because it reduced dramatically the amount of words bearing accents (the reference is to Remington Rand which manufactured both typewriters and rifles in Brazil, either because the reform made typewriting easier or because it "executed" a large number of diacritics).
• 1973: Portugal follows Brazil in abolishing accent marks in secondary stressed syllables.
• 1986: Brazil invites the other six Portuguese language countries, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, to a meeting in Rio de Janeiro to address the remaining problems. A radical reform which would eliminate the acute accent and the circumflex accent from all words except oxytones (as in the orthography of Italian) is proposed, but ill-received by both the Brazilian and the Portuguese media and public, and subsequently abandoned.
• 1990: A new orthographic agreement is reached between Brazil, Portugal and the other Portuguese-speaking countries. Not so radical as the 1986 attempt, it proposes a compromise between the two orthographic systems.
• 2009: The new 1990 spelling reform goes into effect in Brazil and in Portugal, changing the rules of capitalization and hyphen usage, eliminating the trema completely from the language (except for foreign words), changing the diphthongs "éi" and "ói" into "ei" and "oi", respectively in paroxytone words which don't end with a coda /r/, and eliminated silent letters as in acção or óptimo, which are now spelled ação and ótimo.