The Portuguese from Portugal and the Portuguese from Brazil are two completely different languages. They are so different that most of the time we don’t understand each other. It is not just a matter of accent; they are literally two different linguistic systems. Why are we keeping them together?
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Hi Daniel
We appreciate your feedback. The goal of Common Voice is to create voice technology that understands all individuals, not just the largest communities. Portuguese is a multi-centric language, with more than just two places where it is spoken, it is also spoken widely in Africa and is an official language of Timor-Leste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHQWa3YjxC8
In terms of Portuguese being a single linguistic system, there is a community of Portuguese-speaking countries, and in addition the written language is largely or completely intelligible. The spoken language is varyingly intelligible depending on region and even varying by country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Portuguese_Language_Countries
In Common Voice, we believe that adding more voices will improve voice technologies for everyone, and in addition we do not have the resources to have a separate contribution language for each language, country code pair. Presently, There is a limitation in Common Voice at the moment, and that is that contributors cannot specify which variants they are competent to review. So someone who does not understand Portuguese from Portugal, cannot say they do not want to review voices that are labelled with that variant. This is future work, and we are aware of this limitation, and we ask you to bear with us while we develop this capacity.
Common Voice defers to the International Standards Organisation ISO-639 set of standards for language codes. If you think that Portuguese should be classed as two different linguistic systems you can submit a change request here: https://iso639-3.sil.org/code_changes/submitting_change_requests
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