Portunol is the name given to mixed speech that blends Portuguese and Spanish, and it covers two rather different things. Along the Brazil-Uruguay border, especially around the twin cities of Rivera and Santana do Livramento, it refers to a settled contact variety, sometimes called Fronterizo, that local people grow up speaking; it draws its sounds, grammar and vocabulary from both languages and has been studied by linguists for decades. Elsewhere the word is used more loosely for the improvised mixture Spanish and Portuguese speakers produce when each bends towards the other's language, relying on how similar the two already are. Portunol has no official status and no standard spelling, and it is not taught in schools, but songs and some literature from the border region have been written in it.
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