Celebrating World Portuguese Language Day
The nine Portuguese-speaking countries – Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Sao Tome and Príncipe – yesterday celebrated World Portuguese Language Day.
This is a tradition initiated at the 2009 summit of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) and proclaimed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in 2019.
It is a date we ambassadors commemorate with pride alongside their South African friends.
This day has a special meaning for us Lusophones. We are proud that Portuguese is the fifth-most spoken language in the world and the first in the southern hemisphere, with a total of more than 290 million speakers.
Unesco recognises 42 World Heritage cultural sites and 14 Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity elements in the Portuguese-speaking world. International indexes that measure the academic relevance of languages classify Portuguese as the fifth (Social Sciences Citation Index) or the sixth (Science Citation Index) language with the most publications, while its importance in the digital space is indisputable: Portuguese-speakers account for the fifth-largest number of Internet users (171 million).
Lusophone authors would be the pride of any literary tradition. Our music is also greatly admired, with the sound of our language and the delicate mix of genres that characterise our vast repertoire inspiring dreamers in our countries and all over the world. Everybody sings or dances to bossa nova, fado, samba, morna or kuduro.
The 5th of May is also a date to celebrate the very important step that we have taken to work together internationally based on the common bond of language: the creation of the CPLP, which started to develop as an idea at the first summit of the Portuguese-speaking Countries, in 1989, to come into being on 17 July 1996, in Lisbon, initially bringing together Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Sao Tome and Principe.
In 2002, already independent, East Timor became the eighth member country and, in 2014, Equatorial Guinea the ninth. The African countries of this group have taken another fundamental step by joining the [African Countries with Portuguese as an Official Language] initiative.
Portuguese occupies a special place in South Africa, where it appears in the South African consti
tution as a language used by communities and, as such, should be promoted and respected.
South Africa is an important partner – political, economic, cultural – for all our countries.
Celebrating World Portuguese Language Day in South Africa, therefore, reminds us in a very affectionate way of how much our language unites us as countries.