About Us
What is a Lusophone?
A Lusophone artist or person is someone who speaks the Portuguese language natively or by adoption. As an adjective, it means "Portuguese-speaking." The word itself is derived from the name of the ancient Roman province of Lusitania, which covered an area that is today Portugal. The notion of "Lusophone" reaches beyond the dictionary definition of "Portuguese speaker".
The term specifically refers to people whose cultural background is primarily associated with Portuguese language, regardless of ethnic and geographical differences. The Lusophone culture is the legacy of the Portuguese colonial empire. Even after the empire's collapse, the corresponding countries continue to exhibit cultural and political affinity, expressed in the existence of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, created in 1996.
Lusophone countries include Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe, and others in various parts of the world, as well as India's Goa state.
The Community of Portuguese Language Countries is an international organization consisting of the eight independent countries where Portuguese is an official language. These countries are also referred to as the "Lusosphere."
Sometimes Galicia, in Spain, where the Galician language is spoken, is also included, as Galician is similar to Portuguese and sometimes considered the same language.
Lusophone Market
Portuguese is spoken by more than 230 million people, it is one of the world's major languages, ranked sixth according to number of native speakers, 3rd European language most spoken in Europe, and is the official language of eight countries on four continents: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape-Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome e Principe, and East Timor; co-official with Chinese in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau, and with Tetum in East Timor.
It is the language with the largest number of speakers in South America (186 million, over 51% of the continent's population; of Brazil, which will become the third largest market in the world by 2010) and also one of the major linguae francae in Africa.
It is widely spoken, but not official, in Andorra, Luxembourg, Namibia and Paraguay (in the latter country there were 112,520 native Portuguese speakers according to the 2002 census), and in the U.S. states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. There are over 3M Portuguese-speaking people in US, not including Canada.
Click here for the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (Portuguese: Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa; abbreviated to CPLP) - the intergovernmental organization for friendship among lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) nations where Portuguese is an official language.
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Angola Brazil Cape Verde East Timor Guinea Macau Mozambique Portugal São Tomé
