Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "a neve" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

Q: How do you pronounce a neve in Portuguese (Brazil)?

a neve is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a ˈnɛ.vi/. It means “snow.” ah NEH-vee. A wide-open stressed e, and the final e comes out as "ee."

ah NEH-vee. A wide-open stressed e, and the final e comes out as "ee."

a neve /a ˈnɛ.vi/

No accent — the first syllable is loud by rule. The two vowels in this word are both written e and sound quite different: the stressed one is a wide-open "eh" and the unstressed one has climbed all the way to "ee." It's a compact demonstration of how much stress reshapes a Brazilian vowel.

Listen: a neve

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

ne An n opening the word, so nothing nasalizes, and an open e — jaw dropped, like the vowel in "bet." This is the stressed syllable.

ve A true v, then the unstressed final e heard as "ee." A v isn't altered by a following i-sound the way a t or d would be, so the ending is simply "vee."

Hear it in a sentence

Nunca vi neve.

I have never seen snow.

Listen: Nunca vi neve.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Nunca vi neve" strings three words with quite different vowel shapes: a nasal, a stressed high i, and then the open-then-raised pair of "neve." "Nunca" also demonstrates that only its first n is a real consonant — the second is a nasalization marker.

Where English speakers slip

"NAY-vay" closes the first vowel and leaves the second unraised — both wrong. Open the jaw and lift the ending. There's also a practical note: snow is essentially absent from Brazil outside a few southern highlands, so the word comes up far less often than its place in a beginner list suggests.