Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

a pessoa is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a peˈso.ɐ/. It means “person.” ah peh-SOH-ah. The double s is one plain hiss, and the word ends in two separate vowels.

ah peh-SOH-ah. The double s is one plain hiss, and the word ends in two separate vowels.

a pessoa /a peˈso.ɐ/

The "sso" is the second-to-last syllable and therefore the loud one. The final two vowels stay separate rather than forming a diphthong, because Portuguese only builds diphthongs around an unstressed i or u — an o and an a side by side always split into two beats.

Listen: a pessoa

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Sound it out

a A light open vowel with no weight of its own, marking the noun as feminine and doing nothing else.

pe A p made with no puff of air and a closed e, unstressed. Portuguese p has no puff of air, which makes it drier and crisper than the English equivalent.

sso Doubled to keep the sound unvoiced between vowels — a single s there would buzz into a z. The closed "oh" behind it carries the stress.

a A final a taking its own beat, lightening toward "uh." It doesn't merge with the o in front of it, so the noun is three syllables rather than two.

Hear it in a sentence

Ela é uma boa pessoa.

She is a good person.

Listen: Ela é uma boa pessoa.

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"Ela é uma boa pessoa" links four vowel-heavy words in a row, and Brazilians glide straight through: "ela é uma" comes out as one continuous stream. "Boa" is itself two syllables for the same reason "pessoa" ends in two — o and a never fuse.

Where English speakers slip

Lengthening the double s is the phonetic slip; squashing the ending into a diphthong is the rhythmic one. There's also a grammar quirk worth knowing: "pessoa" is grammatically feminine regardless of who it describes, so a man is still "uma pessoa muito simpática" with feminine agreement throughout.