Test Your Knowledge on the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990

Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990:

• The agreement aims to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.
• The agreement was signed in Lisbon, on 16 December 1990, at the end of a negotiation that began in 1980.
• The signatories included official representatives from all of the Portuguese-language countries except East Timor, which later adhered to the Agreement in 2004.
• Galicia was invited to take part in the reform but the Spanish government ignored the invitation, since it officially regards Galician and Portuguese as different languages.
• As of 2023, the agreement has been ratified and implemented by Portugal, Brazil, and Cape Verde.
• Countries like Angola and Mozambique still use the old orthography and have not completed the adoption of the reform.
• The agreement's objectives of unifying the orthography in all CPLP countries and compiling a common vocabulary for the entire Portuguese language have not been fully achieved and failed.
• The Orthographic Agreement of 1990 intends to establish a single official orthography for the Portuguese language and thus to improve its international status.
• The agreement has been the object of disagreements for linguistic, political, economic, and legal reasons.
• The adoption of the new orthography will cause changes in the spelling of about 1.6% of the words in the European norm and about 0.5% in the Brazilian norm.
• The agreement also establishes some common guidelines for the use of hyphens and capitalization.
• This spelling reform was meant to go into effect after all signatory countries had ratified it, but at the end of the decade only Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal had done so, so the agreement could not go into effect.