Pray for My Portuguese
(a famous graffitti in Lisbon, which I digitally “edited”)
A few months ago, I wrote about my experiences in Portugal and with European Portuguese. All in all, I told it like I see it, but as I spend more time in the midst of Portuguese people and their particular variety of Portuguese, I can’t help but see the writing on the wall (but perhaps that’s a bad idiom, since my problem is not with the writing, but rather the prosody*). Basically, it’s come down to the fact that I’m almost going to have to treat European Portuguese as its own language because, if I don’t, I’ll have to continue living in a country whose people I cannot understand.
