I am a German living in Brazil for 16 years now, and nobody here recognize me as a stranger until I say something in Portuguese.
Even my son told me once (that time he was 6, now he’s 14): „Pai, você fala tudo errado. (Dad, you say everything wrong.)“ My answer was: „According to the Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein, this is a matter of the point of view, and from my point of view, my Portuguese is correct and the Brazilians are talking wrong.“ That was a joke, of course.
That said, I live in the state of São Paulo and I can tell that citizens from other regions in the north and north-west of Brazil, most of the time don’t understand me talking, while I had never any problems in the south of Brazil. Once, I gave a presentation, and in the audience some students of Argentina (± Spanish native language) were present. They told me afterwards, that they were able to understand my Portuguese better than that one of the presentations of my Brazilian colleagues.
We got also some colleagues in Portugal, and in conversations with them, neither I nor my Brazilian colleagues understand a lot, if the Portuguese don’t talk slow and take extra care to pronunciation. Sometimes we switched to English with them.
When it comes to written Portuguese, in my experience, the differences are non-essential, and I see no way how it could prevent the people to understand each other - except in cases of totally stubborn opposites, but this is a different story anyway.
There was a Brazilian FreeBSD User Group - which maintained mailing lists, which are dead for some time now. Perhaps it was too ambitious to provide extra mailing lists for every state in Brazil.
This is something to learn from. I assume one forum or one mailing list for all Portuguese dialects would have more chances to survive than to provide dozens, in order to accommodate for regional peculiarities. Here we are back to sort of rule #9: „We currently do not have enough resources to moderate international discussions, ..."
... the actual spoken language (specially the vocabulary) is in practice very different[1], and often lead to length useless discussions about who is right and who is not. ...
Even my son told me once (that time he was 6, now he’s 14): „Pai, você fala tudo errado. (Dad, you say everything wrong.)“ My answer was: „According to the Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein, this is a matter of the point of view, and from my point of view, my Portuguese is correct and the Brazilians are talking wrong.“ That was a joke, of course.
That said, I live in the state of São Paulo and I can tell that citizens from other regions in the north and north-west of Brazil, most of the time don’t understand me talking, while I had never any problems in the south of Brazil. Once, I gave a presentation, and in the audience some students of Argentina (± Spanish native language) were present. They told me afterwards, that they were able to understand my Portuguese better than that one of the presentations of my Brazilian colleagues.
We got also some colleagues in Portugal, and in conversations with them, neither I nor my Brazilian colleagues understand a lot, if the Portuguese don’t talk slow and take extra care to pronunciation. Sometimes we switched to English with them.
When it comes to written Portuguese, in my experience, the differences are non-essential, and I see no way how it could prevent the people to understand each other - except in cases of totally stubborn opposites, but this is a different story anyway.
There was a Brazilian FreeBSD User Group - which maintained mailing lists, which are dead for some time now. Perhaps it was too ambitious to provide extra mailing lists for every state in Brazil.
This is something to learn from. I assume one forum or one mailing list for all Portuguese dialects would have more chances to survive than to provide dozens, in order to accommodate for regional peculiarities. Here we are back to sort of rule #9: „We currently do not have enough resources to moderate international discussions, ..."