123In northern and central Portugal, /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are lenited to fricatives of the same place of articulation ([β], [ð], and [ɣ], respectively) in all places except after a pause, or a nasal vowel, in which contexts they are stops [b,d,ɡ], not dissimilar from English b, d, g(Mateus & d'Andrade 2000, p.11). Most often, it only happens in southern and insular Portugal and in Brazil in some unstressed syllables, generally in relaxed speech, but this is by no means universal.
↑In Galician and some rural northern accents of European Portuguese, /v/ has merged with the [b~β] set.
12In most varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, /d,t/ are palatalized and affricated to post-alveolar (generally alveolo-palatal, but not thus represented here) [dʒ,tʃ] before high front vowels /i,ĩ/.
12345In Galician, nasal and lateral consonants only contrast before vowels. Before consonants, they assimilate to the consonant's place of articulation. In word-final position, only /ŋ/ and /l/ occur.
12In most Brazilian dialects, and in standard Brazilian speech, /l/ is strongly velarized or pharyngealized before /i,ĩ/. In European Portuguese, syllable-final /l/ is usually velarized[ɫ] much like with 'sold' for many English speakers. For most Brazilians, it has been vocalized to [w] before consonants and at the end of words. In traditional Galician, syllable-final /l/ was also velarized; but nowadays it has been widely replaced by a clear l[l] in most dialects.
↑In some Galician dialects /ʎ/ has merged with [j]. Minor yeísmo-like merger is also present in some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, specially the caipira one.
12The rhotic consonant represented as /ʁ/ has considerable variation across different variants, being pronounced as [x], [h], [χ], [ʁ], etc., in Brazil; as [ʁ], [ʀ], [r], etc., in Portugal; and as [r] in Galicia. See also Guttural R in Portuguese.
123The rhotic consonants /ɾ/ ‹r› and /ʁ/ ‹rr› only contrast between vowels. Otherwise, they are in complementary distribution as ‹r›, with /ʁ/ occurring word-initially, after ‹l›, ‹n›, and ‹s› and in compounds; /ɾ/ is found elsewhere.
12The realization of syllable-final ‹r› varies amongst dialects; it is generally pronounced as an alveolar tap [ɾ] in European Portuguese, Galician and some Brazilian dialects (e.g. Rio Grande do Sul state and São Paulo city), as a coronal approximant ([ɹ] or [ɻ]) in various other Brazilian dialects, and as a guttural R in all others (e.g. Rio de Janeiro city, the overwhelmingly majority from the Northeast). Additionally, in some Brazilian Portuguese dialects, word-final ‹r› may be weakened to complete elision in infinitives; e.g. ficar[fiˈka] (note word final ‹r› is pronounced —though as a tap [ɾ]— only if it is followed by a vowel sound in the same phrase or prosodic unit: ficar ao léu[fiˈkaɾawˈlɛw]).
↑Present in loanwords from English. In some Brazilian dialects, it is also the phonetic realization of /ʁ/.
↑In some Galician dialects /ɡ/ is spirantized to [ħ] or [h] in a phonological process known as gheada.
↑In Galician, /x/ may be used in loanwords, foreign names and hispanicized names; like kharxa, Araújo (instead of Araúxo, pron. with [ʃ]) and Fagilde or Fajilde (instead of Faxilde, pron. with [ʃ]).
↑In the dialect of Lisbon, /e/ merges with /ɐ/ when it comes before palatal sounds (e.g. abelha, venho, jeito).
↑Some of the post-stressed high vowels in hiatuses, as in frio ('cold') and rio ('river'), may vary between a reduced vowel [ˈfɾi.u] and a glide [ˈfɾiw], exceptions are verbal conjugations, forming pairs like eu rio[ˈewˈʁi.u] (I laugh) and ele riu[ˈelɨˈʁiw] (he laughed).
↑In Portuguese, word final /ɐ̃/ may diphthongize to [ɐ̃w] (note this realization occurs exclusively in verbal forms spelled with final -am: namoram, falam, ruiram).
↑In Portuguese, word final /ẽ/ diphthongizes to [ẽj] (e.g. sem, também, nuvens). In many European Portuguese dialects (especially central and southern varieties) it has become [ɐ̃j]: sem[ˈsɐ̃j]
↑The semivowels [w] and [j], allophones of vowels /u/ and /i/, can be combined with most vowels to form diphthongs and triphthongs. This includes nasal diphthongs such as [ɐ̃j] and [ɐ̃w], and nasal triphthongs such as [wɐ̃w] and [wõj].
↑Sometimes, Portuguese will present "geminated" semivowels, more accurately each pair being separated to one's own syllable, with the first phone occurring as coda and the second occurring as onset. Examples of such pronunciations are saia and leio for [j.j] and doe or pessoa for [w.w]. They should be transcribed as such.
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