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Why Does Portuguese Sound Like Russian?! (or Polish)

Langfocus0 HN recommenders · 2021–2025
2.5M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2018-11-25

A Langfocus video examining why Portuguese, especially European Portuguese, sounds like Russian or Polish. It compares shared sounds such as vowel reduction and palatalization.

Cited as the explanation whenever commenters notice Portuguese sounds Slavic.

Language & linguistics

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4 comments from Hacker News

@xyzzy212021 · in “Google Translate pronounces 'rooster' in Spanish”

He also has one about Portuguese vs. Russian/Polish: [VIDEO] And extreme syllable-timed language family (opposite of these) are languages Tagalog, Malay, Indonesian. EVERY syllable is pronounced and it becomes a mouthful but there's a strict cadence that comes from it. Foreign words break it a bit but native words are "ma-ka-ba-la-bu-sa-ng-ah-ga-ta-na..." [LINK]

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@wenc2022 · in “The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)”

It’s because Pt-Pt is a stressed timed language vs Br-Pt which is a syllable timed language. Pt-Pt drops a lot of unstressed vowels whereas Br-Pt almost all syllables are pronounced. Langfocus did a video on why (European) Português sounds like Russian. [VIDEO]

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@lm284692024 · in “AI Guesses Your Accent”

It caught me off guard too, portugese from portugal do sound somewhat slavic if you're not familiar with either: [LINK] Even my slavic gf was tricked for a few seconds and wasn't sure if it was some kind of eastern language she wasn't aware of. And for the explanation [VIDEO]

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@danans2025 · in “Is being bilingual good for your brain?”

> My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am. There's an explanation for this [VIDEO]

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