Which language is spoken in Brazil?

Portuguese, uniquely in South America, and the reason is a line drawn on a map before anyone knew what was there. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 split the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal along a meridian in the Atlantic, and the eastern bulge of South America happened to fall on Portugal's side - a division agreed six years before any European reached Brazil.

Brazilian Portuguese has drifted well away from the European version, more so than American English has from British. The pronunciation is more open, the grammar differs in everyday ways, and speakers from Lisbon often find Brazilian easier to understand than the reverse. A spelling reform agreed in 1990 to unify the written language took twenty years to be implemented and is still resented in places.

It also carries a great deal that is not European. Words from Tupi and other indigenous languages are ordinary vocabulary - much of the naming of plants, animals and places - and West African languages brought by the enslaved supplied a large body of words for food, music and religion. Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country in the Americas, by a wide margin, and the language records it.