Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

a vaca is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a ˈva.kɐ/. It means “cow.” ah VAH-kah. A crisp v, a wide-open stressed a, and a light final "uh."

ah VAH-kah. A crisp v, a wide-open stressed a, and a light final "uh."

a vaca /a ˈva.kɐ/

The accent, unwritten, sits on the first syllable. There's a small lexical curiosity here: Portuguese uses "vaca" for the animal and "carne de vaca" or "carne bovina" for the meat, so unlike English there's no separate word doing the work of "beef" — the animal's name carries straight through to the plate.

Listen: a vaca

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Sound it out

va A genuine v with the upper teeth on the lower lip. Portuguese never merges v with b the way Spanish does, so this stays a clear fricative. The vowel is wide open and stressed.

ca An unaspirated hard k before the a and a closing a that softens toward "uh." The two syllables are near-mirror images with different consonants.

Hear it in a sentence

A vaca come grama.

The cow eats grass.

Listen: A vaca come grama.

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"A vaca come grama" is about as phonetically plain as Portuguese sentences get: no nasals, no palatalization, no vocalized l. "Come" ends in a raised e and "grama" has a tapped r in its cluster, and that's the whole difficulty.

Where English speakers slip

Spanish speakers soften the v toward a b, since the two have merged in Spanish, producing something closer to "BAH-kah." Portuguese keeps them distinct. English speakers reduce the final a to a schwa, when Brazilians keep it clearly audible — which matters, because that vowel is carrying the gender.