You might consider libraries to be the museums of language. But in São Paulo that job now falls to the brand new and wildly popular sound and light show that is the Museu da Língua Portuguesa, writes Tom Hennigan
Housed in an elegant railway station, the Estaçao da Luz, which was shipped in boxes from England and pieced together in 1901, its curators claim it is the first museum in the world dedicated to a language.
The location is apt. With its 19 million or so inhabitants, São Paulo has the world's greatest concentration of Portuguese speakers, nearly twice as many as Portugal itself.
The museum's goal is to celebrate the glue that binds together Brazil's multiracial society, descended as it is from Indians, Africans, Europeans, Arabs and Asians. Nearly all were found, brought or came here speaking other tongues but became Brazilians by learning Portuguese.
Of course Portuguese is itself an import to the New World by Brazil's colonial master. A descendant of Latin, Portuguese took on its first recognisable form in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula in the area between the modern city of Porto and the region of Galicia, where Iberia's noblemen had regrouped after the Moorish invasions of the 8th century. The completion of the Portuguese Reconquista by 1250 carried the language into all the lands now called Portugal.
From there it spread to Brazil, Angola and Mozambique as well as smaller outposts such as the islands of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe. In East Timor it lives on as the last living remnant of Europe's first global empire, when Portugal's fearless navigators competed with Spain for control of the New World while opening the sea route to Asia by way of a series of settlements along the coast of Africa.
Calculating such things is by its nature an inexact science, but there are estimated to be more than 200 million speakers of Portuguese in the world today, comfortably placing it within the top 10 of the world's most spoken languages. Even so it maintains a low profile compared, say, with French, which is ever present on school syllabuses but boasts fewer than half the number of native speakers.
Most Portuguese speakers today live in Brazil and it is here, more than anywhere else, that the language's future is being shaped, a fact of which natives of Portugal are very aware. These days little of Portugal's cultural output penetrates Brazil, whereas Brazilian television, music and movies are increasingly consumed in Portugal. Nothing makes the Portuguese more aware of this one-sided relationship than the fact they can easily understand the Brazilian accent whereas Brazilians have great difficulty with theirs.
The Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago was once interrupted during a conference in Brazil by a member of the audience who told the language's greatest living exponent that, despite their sharing a common tongue, he did not understand a word Saramago was saying.
"Bad luck," was Saramago's sharp reply. "It's my language, your accent." Foreign ears can very quickly spot the differences that gave rise to the above incident. Accents from Brazil have music in their soul compared with the guttural lispings of Portugal, which can leave the untrained ear feeling as if it is listening to a Russian station on a badly tuned radio.
But already younger Portuguese will adapt their accents when speaking to Brazilians for the sake of better communication. As a Portuguese friend says: "Soon it will be their language, our accent." But the Portuguese have none of the condescension felt by many people in Ireland and Britain towards American accents - rather, an appreciation that Brazilian Portuguese is more fun.
In part this sense of fun comes from Brazilians' very loose approach to some time-honoured grammatical rules. This has caused some Portuguese to claim that Brazilians are mangling the language. But a long line of Brazilian literary heavyweights defend such mangling as innovations.
Brazil is also the principal source of most of Portuguese's modern slang and an easy entry point to the language for foreign words.
With a long tradition of adopting and absorbing words from their Indian, African and immigrant communities, Brazilians have none of the obsessive vigilance against alien vocabulary found in countries such as France.
Editorials in the country's more traditional newspapers will unselfconsciously use such English phrases as "know-how" and "office-boy" and Brazilian shopping centres are full of establishments with names such as Sidewalk (shoes), Coffee Shop (as on the label) and Spicy (which sells a funky selection of kitchenware).
This magpie tendency to pinch words, combined with an accent that likes to roll around every letter, can cause some confusion for visitors. Shortly after arriving in Brazil I was introduced to a woman named Hootchie, which I thought was a fascinating steal from US pop culture. It was therefore something of an anticlimax when some time later I saw her name written down for the first time.
Hootchie, it transpires, is the Brazilian pronunciation of the still pretty but somewhat less exotic name of Ruth.
Such accents are now on display at the Estação da Luz, and at street corners everywhere in Brazil.