Brazilian Portuguese descends from the language brought by Portuguese colonizers beginning in 1500, gradually diverging from European Portuguese through contact with Tupi-Guaraní indigenous languages and the West African languages of enslaved peoples. Indigenous contact enriched the vocabulary particularly in domains of fauna, flora, and place names, giving rise to thousands of words unique to Brazilian Portuguese. The slave trade from Angola, Mozambique, and West Africa introduced significant phonological and lexical influences, especially in the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. By independence in 1822 and into the nineteenth century, Brazilian Portuguese had developed distinct phonological features — notably the preservation of unstressed vowels and a different intonation pattern — that set it apart from the Lisbon standard. Today Brazilian Portuguese, spoken by over 215 million people, is the most widely spoken Romance language in the Southern Hemisphere and the dominant form of Portuguese worldwide.
