Duck and I have begun learning Portuguese! To be fair, our journeys are pretty different. Duck is proficient in Romanian, which, although also a Romance language, is pretty far from Portuguese (though he keeps remarking on how much easier it is to learn than Hungarian!). He’s meeting with a tutor to get him up to speed to join the Beginner 2 class at the nearby Cambridge Center for Adult Education in September. Meanwhile, I speak Spanish fluently and took a class last summer at the CCAE called Portuguese for Spanish Speakers that showed most of the similarities and differences between the two languages. This summer I enrolled in another class, Intermediate Conversation, with the same teacher.

Two weeks ago, I also went to a Meetup of Portuguese speakers, which was great if hard to hear, and I intend to continue going (the meetups happen every two weeks). From there, I was put in touch with Deborah, a woman about my age from Rio de Janeiro. Deborah arrived in Boston from Brazil about a month ago and is mostly tutoring me in Portuguese, correcting my grammar very patiently through WhatsApp (an international texting app). We met up once – again, hard to hear, but I intend to continue, hopefully in quieter places.

Now, a bit about accents (sotaques) and one of my favorite words, demonyms (and a word that continually impresses Duck every time I bust it out)! My teacher, Katia, is a lovely woman from Minas Gerais (the same state as Belo Horizonte, so I am getting a taste of the accent as well, which is different than the accent of cariocas (people from Rio de Janeiro) and paulistanos (people from Sao Paulo). My teacher is a Mineiro; she is from a town in Minas Gerais called Governador Valladares. Someone from the capital, Belo Horizonte, is called a Belo-horizontino or just a mineiro de BH, according to Deborah.

I have trouble remembering the word carioca; I think of tapioca first and eventually get there. Deborah asked me what people from “my city” are called and I immediately said, “oh, we don’t have nearly as many complicated names as you do” and then she asked me what someone from Massachusetts is called and I had to admit that we are Bay Staters (if you’re feeling generous; Massholes if you’re not).

People from Michigan are Michiganders; there are Detroiters and Bostonians and New Yorkers. I’d love to share a little with Deborah – what are some other demonyms out there?