What language is spoken in Brazil? Portuguese, plus 295 more

What language is spoken in Brazil? Portuguese. It is the only official language, written into Article 13 of the 1988 Constitution, and it is the language of schools, courts and almost every street. But Brazil is not monolingual: its 2022 census counted 295 Indigenous languages spoken in the country. This guide sets out what the Constitution says, what the census found and what it means if you want to learn the language. To see how much Portuguese you already know, try the free Portuguese level test.

Updated November 15, 2026 · 5 min read

What language is spoken in Brazil, officially?

Article 13 of the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil is one sentence long: A língua portuguesa é o idioma oficial da República Federativa do Brasil — the Portuguese language is the official language of the Federative Republic of Brazil. The same article goes on to name the national symbols (the flag, the anthem, the arms and the seal), which tells you how the 1988 Constitution sees the language: as part of what the state is. So the short answer to "what language do they speak in Brazil" is Portuguese — not Spanish, which is spoken by Brazil's neighbours.

Portuguese in school, and the right to Indigenous languages

The Constitution makes Portuguese the language of education, with one important guarantee. Article 210, paragraph 2: regular primary education será ministrado em língua portuguesa — is given in Portuguese — while Indigenous communities are also assured the use of their mother tongues and their own ways of learning. Article 231 goes further and recognises the Indigenous peoples' social organisation, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions.

How many languages are spoken in Brazil?

Brazil's statistics office, IBGE, published the language results of the 2022 census in October 2025. According to the government news agency Agência Gov, the census found 391 Indigenous ethnic groups and 295 Indigenous languages spoken in the country. The previous census, in 2010, had counted 305 ethnic groups and 274 languages. The full results are in IBGE's publication Censo Demográfico 2022: etnias e línguas indígenas.

Note the last row: in 2010 languages were counted among people aged five or older, in 2022 among people aged two or older, so the two figures are not measured in exactly the same way.

The Indigenous languages with the most speakers

The census names the three Indigenous languages with the largest number of speakers:

Even the largest of them is spoken by fewer than 52,000 people, out of the 474,856 speakers of an Indigenous language that the census counted. For almost everyone you meet in Brazil, Portuguese is the language of daily life.

Portuguese and Brazilian citizenship

The language also appears in the nationality rules. Article 12 of the Constitution says that people may become naturalised Brazilians na forma da lei — as the law provides — and that for people from Portuguese-speaking countries the only requirements are one year of uninterrupted residence and good character. In other words, the Constitution itself gives speakers of Portuguese from other countries a shorter road. For the detailed procedure, the federal law and the authorities' own pages are the reference; this guide does not cover them.

Portugal has its own rules: if you are looking at Portuguese nationality rather than Brazilian, see our guide to the A2 requirement and the CIPLE exam and the CAPLE Portuguese exams (with our CAPLE path).

Learning the language spoken in Brazil

If you are going to Brazil, learn Portuguese — and start with the words you will use every day: greetings, numbers, food, directions. Our advice is to begin with a short test to find your level, then build vocabulary in small daily sets. You can hear Portuguese words on 16Word in the free Portuguese level test and in the course itself. Many learners compare it with Spanish; if you speak Spanish, try the Spanish level test too, and see how Spain handles the same question in the DELE A2 and CCSE for Spanish nationality.

Speaking is where most learners get stuck. If you want to practise Portuguese out loud with a teacher, Edluxio offers live one-to-one lessons with teachers and professionals in many fields, starting with a trial lesson that is fully refunded if it is not right for you.

Where other languages are spoken

Our other guides on who speaks what: where English is spoken, where French is spoken, where Chinese is spoken, where Japanese is spoken, the languages of Belgium and what language is spoken in Luxembourg — home to a large Portuguese-speaking community, for whom we wrote aprender luxemburguês.

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