History of Portuguese

The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. Old Portuguese, also known as Galician-Portuguese, began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, also known as barbarian invasions in the 5th century and started appearing in written documents around the 9th century. By the 13th century, Galician-Portuguese had become a mature language with its own literature and began to split into two languages. In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin with some influences from other languages, namely the native Gallaecian language spoken prior to the Roman domination.

Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the ancient Romans brought with them Latin, from which all Romance languages descend. The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous civilizations. Later, the inhabitants of the cities of Lusitania and the rest of Romanized Iberia were recognized as citizens of Rome.

Roman control of the western part of Hispania was not consolidated until the campaigns of Augustus in 26 BC. Although the western territories to the south of the Tagus River were only conquered after the victory of Licinius Crassus in the year 93 BC, only an estimated four hundred words of the native languages persist in modern Portuguese. After 200 years of wars first with the Carthaginians in the Eastern part of the peninsula, and then the local inhabitants, emperor Augustus conquered the whole peninsula, which was named Hispania. He then divided it into three provinces, Hispania Tarraconensis, Hispania Baetica, and Lusitania, the latter of which included most of modern Portugal. In the 3rd century, emperor Diocletian split Tarraconensis into three, creating the adjacent province of Gallaecia, which geographically enclosed the remaining part of Portugal, and modern-day Galicia (in the northwestern region of Spain).

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