Portuguese language
Country Population ( July 2017 est . ) More information Spoken by
Uruguay 3,444,006 Portuguese in Uruguay Significant minority as a native language
Argentina 43,847,430 Portuguese in Argentina Minority as a second language
Paraguay 7,052,984 Portuguese in Paraguay Significant minority as a native language
Venezuela 31,568,179 Portuguese in Venezuela Minority as a second language
South Africa 57,725,600 Portuguese in South Africa Small minority as a native language
Namibia 2,606,971 Portuguese in Namibia Small minority as a native language
Congo 5,125,821 Portuguese in Congo Small minority as a second language
Zambia 16,591,390 Portuguese in Zambia Small minority as a second language
Senegal 15,411,614 Portuguese in Senegal Small minority as a second language
Eswatini 1,343,098 Portuguese in Eswatini Small minority as a second language
Geographic distribution -- Portuguese as a foreign language
Portuguese is a mandatory subject in the school curriculum in Uruguay . [ 65 ] Other countries where Portuguese is commonly taught in schools or where it has been introduced as an option include Venezuela , [ 66 ] Zambia , [ 67 ] the Republic of the Congo , [ 68 ] Senegal , [ 68 ] Namibia , [ 46 ] Eswatini ( Swaziland ) , [ 68 ] South Africa , [ 68 ] Ivory Coast , [ 69 ] and Mauritius . [ 70 ] In 2017 , a project was launched to introduce Portuguese as a school subject in Zimbabwe . [ 71 ] [ 72 ] Also , according to Portugal 's Minister of Foreign Affairs , the language will be part of the school curriculum of a total of 32 countries by 2020 . [ 73 ] In the countries listed below , Portuguese is spoken either as anative language by minorities due to the Portuguese colonial past or as a lingua franca in bordering and multilingual regions , such as on the border between Brazil and Uruguay , as well as Angola and Namibia .
Portuguese (português or, in full, língua portuguesa) is a Western Romance language originating in the Iberian Peninsula. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea and Chinese Macau. As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese and Portuguese creole speakers are also found in Goa, Daman and Diu in India; in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka; in the Indonesian island of Flores; in the Malacca state of Malaysia; and the ABC islands in the Caribbean where Papiamento is spoken, while Cape Verdean Creole is the most widely spoken Portuguese-based Creole. A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as Lusophone (Lusófono). Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has kept some Celtic phonology and lexicon. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 250 million total speakers, Portuguese is usually listed as the sixth most natively spoken language in the world, the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers, and the most spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also the second-most spoken language, after Spanish, in South America and all of Latin America, one of the 10 most spoken languages in Africa and is an official language of the European Union, Mercosur, OAS, ECOWAS and the African Union. The Community of Portuguese Language Countries is an international organization made up of all of the world's officially Lusophone nations.