Brazil is the size of a continent and sounds like it. The Portuguese spoken in Rio, in São Paulo, in Salvador and in Porto Alegre differs enough that Brazilians place each other within a sentence, and the two best known are the two that most learners will meet first.
Rio, and the hiss
o chiado: the palatalisation of s at the end of a syllable, so it comes out as sh. Mesmo becomes meshmu, dois becomes doish, as portas becomes ash portash.
The standard account traces it to 1808, when the Portuguese court fled Napoleon and relocated to Rio, bringing something like fifteen thousand people and the pronunciation of Lisbon with them. Rio acquired the sound of the metropole, kept it, and turned it into the accent of the capital.
The carioca r is also distinctive: a strong guttural sound in the throat, closer to a French r than to anything else in the language.
mermão: from meu irmão, my brother. The carioca term of address, worn down by use.
maneiro: cool, good, nice. Rio's word.
sinistro: literally sinister, used to mean extraordinary in either direction. Foi sinistro can be very good or very bad.
caô: a lie, nonsense, patter. Contar caô.
um bicho: a guy, a bloke, in carioca usage.
São Paulo, and the Italians
São Paulo received one of the largest Italian immigrations in the Americas, and the city's speech absorbed the rhythm of it. Paulista Portuguese has an intonation that Brazilians identify immediately and that has been affectionately mocked for a century.
The s stays a clean s, with no chiado. The r at the end of a syllable is soft.
mano: mate, brother. The paulista counterpart to Rio's mermão, and now spread nationally through hip-hop.
meu: used as a vocative filler, roughly man. Fala, meu.
tipo assim: like, sort of. The paulista discourse marker, used at a density that other Brazilians find funny.
da hora: cool, great. São Paulo's answer to maneiro.
The caipira r, which is neither
Inland from São Paulo, through Minas Gerais and into Goiás, sits the caipira accent, and it has the feature most likely to startle an English speaker.
o erre caipira: a retroflex r, made with the tongue curled back, which sounds very close to the r of American English. Porta comes out something like porter.
It is the accent of the interior, of country music, and of a large part of the population, and it is almost entirely absent from national television, which is worth knowing when you wonder why real Brazil sounds different from the Brazil you studied.
The other three worth recognising
mineiro: , from Minas Gerais, contracts everything. Onde é que você vai? collapses towards ondocê vai? A famous local joke holds that a mineiro can order a Coke in two syllables. Uai is the regional exclamation, and trem, literally train, is used to mean thing, anything at all.
gaúcho: , from Rio Grande do Sul, tchê as a vocative, bah as an all-purpose exclamation, and a tu that takes third-person verb endings, which is grammatically its own thing. Shares a border and a great deal of culture with Uruguay and Argentina, including mate.
nordestino: , across the northeast, oxente for surprise, vixe for dismay, arretado for excellent or furious depending on where you are. The northeast has more speakers than most European countries and is systematically underrepresented in the media that learners consume.
Which one to learn
Either carioca or paulista, and mostly it will be decided for you by where you go or what you watch.
Carioca has a slight edge for a learner because Globo, the dominant television network, is based in Rio and the accent is consequently the closest thing Brazil has to a broadcast standard. Paulista is equally understood everywhere and is the accent of the largest city in the southern hemisphere.
Neither will mark you. Both are a long way from European Portuguese, which is a separate question covered in the Portugal and Brazil article.
What actually matters more than the accent
The vowels. Brazilian Portuguese gives unstressed vowels their full value, which is precisely why learners find it easier than European Portuguese, where they are reduced almost out of existence.
Get the vowels right and the regional accent is a detail. Get them wrong and no amount of chiado will help.
How to learn it
Save the city with the word. Mermão is Rio and mano is São Paulo, and a note without the city is half a note.
Give Translate the whole line. Regional Brazilian speech contracts heavily, particularly mineiro, and single words will not survive the process.
Then let repetition do it. Thirty regional words is a fortnight, and the accent itself comes from listening rather than from study.
The short version
Rio hisses, São Paulo sings, and the interior curls its r. Learn maneiro and mermão, or mano and da hora, depending on where you land.
And when someone from Minas says trem, they almost certainly do not mean a train.
Heard Brazilian Portuguese you could not place? Put the line into Vokabulo with the state. Free to start on iPhone, iPad and in the browser. 🇧🇷
