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The language was spread worldwide in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as Portugal created the first and the longest lived modern-world colonial and commercial empire ( 1415– 1975), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macau in China. As a result, Portuguese is now the official language of several independent countries and is widely spoken or studied as a second language in many others. There are still more than 20 Portuguese Creole languages. It is an important minority language in Andorra, Luxembourg and Namibia. Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, including Paris in France and Boston, New Bedford, and Newark in the United States.
Portuguese is nicknamed A língua de Camões ("The language of Camões", after Luís de Camões, the author of The Lusiad); A última flor do Lácio ("The last flower of Latium"). Portuguese language speakers are known as Lusitanic or Lusophones.
Portuguese developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from the spoken Latin language brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. The language began to differentiate itself from other Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century. It started to be used in written documents around the 9th century, and by the 15th century it had become a mature language with a rich literature.
The Romans conquered the Western Iberian Peninsula, which they called Hispania: later part of the Roman provinces of Lusitania and Gallaecia, currently Portugal and Galiza (the northwestern region of Spain). Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, they brought with them the Roman people's language, Vulgar Latin, from which all Romance languages (also known as "New Latin languages") descend. Roman control of the western part of Hispania was not consolidated until the campaigns of Caesar Augustus in 26 BC, but already in the 2nd century BC southern Lusitania was Romanized, and very few traces of the native languages persist in modern Portuguese. Strabo, a 1st-century Greek geographer, comments in one book of his Geographia: "they have adopted the Roman customs, and they no longer remember their own language."
In the 3rd century the Roman emperor Diocletian split the Tarragonensis province in three and the Gallaecia province was created, western Hispania was then made of Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north.
Between 409 A.D. and 711, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by peoples of Germanic origin, known by the Romans as Barbarians. The Barbarians (mainly Suevi and Visigoths) largely absorbed the Roman culture and language of the peninsula; however, since the Roman schools and administration were closed and Europe entered the Dark Ages, the Latin Vulgar language was left free to evolve on its own and the uniformity of the Peninsula was soon disrupted. In the western part of the Peninsula (today's Northern Portugal and Galicia), Vulgar Latin gained some local characteristics and in that region the Suevi settled, leading to the formation of the "Lusitanian Romance Language". The Germanic languages influenced Portuguese in words linked to the military, such as guerra ("war").
From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions. However, the population continued to speak their Romance dialects, the Mozarabs; so that when the Moors were overthrown, the influence that they had exerted on the language was small. Its main effect was in the lexicon: modern Portuguese still has a large number of words of Arabic origin, especially relating to food, agriculture and crafts, which have no cognates in other Romance languages. But there is no loan word in the lexicon related to human feelings, all being of Latin origin. The Arabic influence is also visible in placenames throughout the Southern provinces, such as Algarve, Alfama and Fátima.
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