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

Langfocus · 2.5M views · 2018-11-25 · 11:06

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Overview

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

On Hacker News

Cited as the explanation whenever commenters notice Portuguese sounds Slavic.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

Language & linguistics
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portugueserussianpolishpronunciationlinguistics

What people said

danans · 2025-06 · Reference

> 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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lm28469 · 2024-12 · Reference

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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wenc · 2022-01 · Reference

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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Sources

Video by Langfocus, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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