LANGUAGE REFERENCE
Portuguese ALT Codes
Type á, à, â, ã, é, ê, ó, ô, õ, ú, ç without changing your keyboard.
Portuguese has one of the more elaborate accent systems in the Romance languages — five different diacritics (acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, cedilla) distributed across 26 characters. The tilde on ã and õ is especially distinctive; no other major European language nasalizes vowels in writing this way. If you're writing Brazilian or European Portuguese names (São Paulo, João, Aparição), ALT codes cover every case.
About Portuguese
The tilde is a nasalization mark. Portuguese is unusual in that it writes nasal vowels directly using a tilde. Ã and õ are nasalized versions of a and o — the sound resonates through the nose, similar to French un/on/en/in but spelled transparently. São (saint), pão (bread), mão (hand), coração (heart), não (no). Every Portuguese learner meets the tilde in week one.
Brazilian and European Portuguese diverge on accents. After the 1990 Orthographic Agreement (implemented 2009-2015), Brazilian Portuguese dropped some accents that European Portuguese kept. Idéia became ideia. Vôo became voo. But the big accents (á, ã, ç, ê, ó) remain in both variants.
The circumflex marks closed vowels. On ê and ô the circumflex indicates a closed, more tense sound: você (you), avô (grandfather). Compare with the open é and ó: café (coffee) has an open e. The circumflex on â is rarer but appears in words like lâmpada (lamp).
The cedilla works like in French. Ç softens c from /k/ to /s/ before a, o, u. Coração (heart), atenção (attention), serviço (service). Without the cedilla these would be pronounced with /k/. In Portuguese ç almost always appears before a, o, or u — before e or i, the c is already soft.
The grave accent has one specific use. À only appears in contractions of the preposition a (to) with the definite article a (the). Vou a a praia becomes vou à praia ("I'm going to the beach"). It's a grammatical marker more than a pronunciation guide.