• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Not really (source: am a Portuguese currently living in Portugal).

    Kids here can immitate a Brasilian accent, and so can many if not most adults, because maybe 4 decades ago Brasilian soap operas became all the rage in Portuguese TV, but they don’t go around normally speaking with a Brasilian accent.

    Then again I can immitate a number of US regional accents (well enough to fool Brits) and a number of British regional accents (well enough to fool Americans) when speaking English, but that’s not at all the same as generally speaking with that accent (though, having lived over a decade in London, my English language accent tends towards RP English, also because I actually made an effort to make my speech easier for locals to understand, rather than the confusing Portuguese/Dutch/American/RP accent I tended to have when speaking English in lazy mode).

    There are a lot of Brasilians in Portugal (about 3% of the population, not counting those who got Portuguese nationality which they can after 5 years without having to give up their Brasilian nationality) and that also includes a lot of kids, so of those kids the ones who came here when they were already 5 years old or older would speak with a Brasilian accent.

    In my own experience living in several countries and learning their language, which included picking up their accent, you don’t get the accent of the speech you’re exposed to a small part of the time, you pick up the one you’re exposed to most of the time, so for example my Dutch has an Amsterdam accent and I didn’t at all try to pick it up, I just lived there and that’s what I heard most of the time from those I spoke with.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The article says they’re “speaking like brasilians” in the title and then in the text says that’s them using a few words from Brasilian Portuguese (giving examples), which is nothing new (my generation also picked up words from it because of soap operas and I’m in my 50s) and isn’t at all the same as “speaking with a Brasilian accent”, something which as I explained from my own experience has way higher criteria of exposure to actually happen.

        It sounds a lot like a Pearl Clutching article from the original source of those “news”, the Diário De Noticias newspaper which is very old and conservative.

        • Dagnet@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Well sure, let me change from accent to dialect and the post is still the same for all that is worth

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            It’s still not dialect.

            It’s merelly a few words.

            The whole thing is a storm in a teacup from a conservative newspaper.