There are different words for one thing. People who speak European Portuguese may well not understand Brazilian Portuguese too. These factors make painful and boring European variety to be heard and understood by Brazilians. Brazilians are not used to such variant. The text seems inaccurate and wrong in some points. Anonymous: I appreciate your opinion and comment, and I do agree with some points but disagree in others.
My viewpoints have been gained through trips to Brazil and working with Brazilians. Whether Brazilian Portuguese is diglossic or not is definitely a controversial subject. I have been to Portugal few times, and I noticed that Portuguese people are very exposed to the Portuguese spoken in Brazil.
Thanks to Brazilian movies, soap operas, music, and the many Brazilian immigrants that moved to Portugal in the recent years, the Portuguese people do understand BP, even the colloquial expressions. But the contrary doesn't always apply. I agree with you when you said Brazilians are barely exposed to European Portuguese.
On top of that, there are phonetic differences, some variations in grammar and vocabulary, which gets the EP closer to the H-variant. The so-called well-educated people in Portugal tend to use more the formal variety of Portuguese than Brazilians, in my opinion. The latter is the mother tongue of Brazilians, the former has to be learned in school, and a majority of population does not manage to master it appropriately.
Our mother tongue is not Portuguese, but Brazilian Vernacular. This is not a slogan, nor a political statement, it is simply recognition of a fact. So, there are hopes, that within some years, we will have appropriate grammars of our mother tongue, the language that has been ignored, denied and despised for such a long time. Mike, I tend to side with Anonymous above. I agree with you and the linguist that there are two languages the written and the spoken, but this is true everywhere.
