Brazilian speech therapists in Portugal say their struggle for professional recognition reflects a wider prejudice embedded in Portuguese society against the language variant of its former colony. The issue has been described as “glottophobia”, a term meaning linguistic discrimination, by Tanise Anhaia, president of the Brazilian Speech Therapists Association in Portugal (AFBP).
Licensing hurdles for Brazilian speech therapists
Iracema Ferreira, a 45-year-old Brazilian speech therapist who moved to Portugal in 2020, began bringing a Portuguese dictionary to her nursing classes as a retort to accusations she was speaking Brazilian, not Portuguese. “It was to show that those words are in the Portuguese language dictionary,” she said. She abandoned her speech therapy career after hearing from colleagues that getting a licence to work in the country was a dead end, and switched to nursing.
According to the AFBP, which was set up last year, barely any Brazilians have been awarded a licence to practise as a speech therapist in Portugal since 2019. One of the two exceptions is a woman whose lawyer argued her rejection was “totally incomprehensible, illegal and unconstitutional” and got it overturned.
Wider prejudice and discrimination
Brazilians make up the largest migrant group in Portugal, numbering more than 480,000, according to the Portuguese migration agency, AIMA. The Brazilian foreign ministry puts the figure higher, at 628,000 in 2025. As the group has grown, so have reports of xenophobia. In 2022, the commission for equality and against racial discrimination reported that “Brazilian nationality” was the most common basis of discrimination in complaints received, forming 34% of all complaints.
In 2023, Statistics Portugal reported that 55% of Brazilians said they had suffered discrimination, the biggest proportion in terms of nationality. Last year, a Portuguese man was arrested after posting a video offering 500 euros for each “Brazilian head” delivered to him.
A Brazilian woman living in the Lisbon district, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Guardian she had seen her then eight-year-old being punched by another child and told: “That’s for Brazilians to learn that they have to go back to their land.” At a school meeting, she remembered a teacher saying “the kids were speaking too ‘Brazilianised’” and that they would themselves receive speech therapy.
Linguistic debate and reactions
The popularity of Brazilian YouTubers is leading more young people to emulate the speech of their favourite stars, say parents and linguists. Afrânio Barbosa, dean of the Centre for Letters and Arts at Brazil’s federal university of Rio de Janeiro, noted a similar panic in Portugal in the 1980s over Brazilian soap operas. “Every time a Brazilian cultural product spreads in Portugal there is such a reaction. And you hear the same sentences: ‘They are worsening the Portuguese language’,” he said. “These are social reactions due to a colonial symbolic projection of the language, as if its legitimacy lay in its geographical origin and not in the historical demographic identity of its speakers.”
Brazil and Portugal are part of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, which has the “diffusion of the Portuguese language” as one of its goals. Yet whether the variants are different languages splits linguists. Renato Basso, a professor of linguistics at the federal university of São Carlos, called it “a very complex discussion”. He said the Brazilian Portuguese spoken by university graduates from urban centres and the European standard are relatively similar, and that in schools it is important for everyone to have access to a “standard norm”. However, linguists point out that even within Brazil and Portugal, people speak differently depending on where they live and their social circle. “If you get stuck with the idea that there is only one version of a language, everything gets too complicated,” said Basso.
That is what speech therapists are being told, however. When Anhaia sat the test to get a licence in 2021, there was no linguist present, just a speech therapist, she recalled. The examiner told her: “I won’t approve you because you don’t speak European Portuguese.” Anhaia will sit the test again this year. Margarita Correia, a Portuguese linguist, called the requirement “absurd”. The body responsible for the licences, ACSS, said some candidates lacked the knowledge to assess the Portuguese population and that their university degrees were not equivalent. The ACSS declined to comment, and the Portuguese Association of Speech Therapists said its members did not have the authority to comment.
Álvaro Filho, a Brazilian journalist and writer who has lived in Lisbon since 2016, assembled chronicles of life as a migrant in his new book Eu Não Falo Brasileiro (I Don’t Speak Brazilian). One chronicle is about his son, whose teacher said “he would just pass the class if he spoke Portuguese”. “It’s implicit that when they say you speak Brazilian it’s because they don’t recognise this Portuguese variant as an equal. It’s worse,” he said. “It might become an autonomous version, but it has to be our decision, from Brazil.”
