Portuguese medical interpreters
Real-time Portuguese medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.
841,300 people in the U.S. speak Portuguese at home.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Darker states have more Portuguese speakers; shading is logarithmic, relative to the state with the most speakers.
| State | Speakers |
|---|---|
| Massachusetts | 183,200 |
| Florida | 139,500 |
| New Jersey | 90,790 |
| Connecticut | 37,810 |
| Rhode Island | 25,780 |
| Georgia | 20,710 |
| Pennsylvania | 18,280 |
| Maryland | 15,530 |
| Utah | 13,810 |
| North Carolina | 10,150 |
| Colorado | 6,636 |
| South Carolina | 6,490 |
| New Hampshire | 5,167 |
| Louisiana | 3,603 |
| Alabama | 2,546 |
| District of Columbia | 1,759 |
| Maine | 1,377 |
| Idaho | 1,363 |
| Arkansas | 1,102 |
| Vermont | 384 |
The 10 states with the most Portuguese speakers
State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where Portuguese falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.
297,900
speakers of Portuguese speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.
35%
of Portuguese speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.
183,200
people speak Portuguese at home in Massachusetts alone.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Meet Opalite.
Real-time AI medical interpretation in 150+ languages and dialects, connecting providers and patients in seconds.
- Works on the devices care teams already carry: phones, tablets, computers, and telehealth platforms
- Integrates with all EHRs
- Built for HIPAA-compliant healthcare
- SOC 2 Type II attested security controls
What to know when interpreting Portuguese
Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the Portuguese features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).
Indo-European · Romance · Eurasia
6.3%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Portuguese sometimes needs a second “not” alongside words like “nobody” or “nothing” and sometimes not, so an interpreter must read the doubled negative as one denial and never as a cancelled one.
WALS 115A · Negative Indefinite Pronouns and Predicate Negation · Mixed behaviour
7.1%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Portuguese builds words like “someone” and “anything” from several unrelated patterns, so an interpreter must not read a “some” word as “any” in a question about symptoms.
7.6%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Portuguese stress falls on a different syllable from word to word with no rule to predict it, so an interpreter must know each medical term’s stress or risk saying a different word.
WALS 16A · Weight Factors in Weight-Sensitive Stress Systems · Lexical stress
How Portuguese is structured
- Word ordersubject, object and verb
- SVO
- Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
- Prepositions
- Adjectivebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Adjective
- Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
- Demonstrative-Noun
- Numeralnumber before or after the noun
- Not coded
- Genitivepossessor before or after
- Noun-Genitive
- Relative clausebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Relative clause
- Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
- Strongly suffixing
- Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
- Not coded
- Casesnumber of noun cases
- Not coded
- Gendersnumber of noun genders
- Not coded
- Classifierscounting words for nouns
- Not coded
Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Portuguese entry: wals.info POR. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Values are reproduced as WALS codes them; each links to its datapoint. The clinical readings are Opalite’s own inferences and are not part of WALS.
FAQs about Portuguese medical interpreters
Three states hold 49% of the nation’s Portuguese speakers, and Portuguese ranks in the published top-15 language tables of 20 states.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for Portuguese as it does for Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. In Opalite’s published validation study, those three languages were evaluated in clinical conversations, with over 90% fewer errors than certified medical interpreters across the conversations studied.
States where Portuguese is a top 15 non-English language
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- North Carolina
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- Utah
- Vermont
Try Portuguese medical interpretation.
See a live conversation interpreted. Ask about setup and pricing.


