Thread: How old is Portuguese?

How old is Portuguese as a language? When did people first start speaking it?

I think it came from Spanish, so I have to think it isn't that old.

1,200-1,700 years old:
History of the Portuguese language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, the Portuguese language was developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. It began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Barbarian invasions in the 5th century, and started to be used in written documents around the 9th century. By the 13th century it had become a mature language, with its own literature, called by modern linguists Galician-Portuguese. In all aspects — phonology, morphology, lexicon, and sintax — it is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin, with fairly minor influences from other languages.

Yes, the Portuguese language came from Latin language. It is one of the variations of Latin language, such as Spanish and Italian are.

Latin was the main language of Roman Empire which has dominated most of the south regions of Europe for centuries, so the people had to speak the Lating language, but it was dificult for the humble people to understand and speak the sophisticated Latin language, so languages such as Portuguese, Spanish and Italian have emerged from the humble people who had lived in the countryside of the south of Europe (where are Portugal, Spanish and Italy). That´s why Portuguese is a Vulgar Latin, because it was spoken by the humble people of the countryside.