How to Pronounce 'A Água': Portuguese (Brazil) Pronunciation Guide

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

a água is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a ˈa.gwɐ/. It means “water.” ah AH-gwuh. Both a's are open, and the stress sits on the very first syllable of the noun, not the last.

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

ah AH-gwuh. Both a's are open, and the stress sits on the very first syllable of the noun, not the last.

a água /a ˈa.gwɐ/

The accent on á looks redundant at first — the word ends in -a, so the default already says stress the second-to-last syllable. But "água" splits as á-gua, and Portuguese requires a written accent on any second-to-last-stressed word that ends in a diphthong, which "-ua" is. The mark exists to satisfy that rule, not to move the stress.

Listen: a água

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Sound it out

a The article merges almost entirely into the noun here, since both begin with the same open "ah" — you get one slightly lengthened vowel rather than two separate beats.

á The acute accent marks the stressed syllable and confirms the vowel is the wide-open kind, tongue low, like the a in "father." This is the loudest part of the phrase.

gu Here the u is actually pronounced — a w glide after a hard g, giving "gw." That's unusual: in "guerra" or "guitarra" the u is silent and only there to keep the g hard, but before an a it does real work.

a The final unstressed a softens toward a light "uh," quieter and more central than the accented á, but never disappearing into nothing the way it would in Lisbon.

Hear it in a sentence

Quero um copo de água.

I want a glass of water.

Listen: Quero um copo de água.

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"Quero um copo de água" hides a nice detail: "de água" is written in full but spoken as a rush, "dji AH-gwuh," with the de raised to "dji" as always. And "copo" ends in the unstressed o that Brazilians raise to "oo," so the run of words comes out "KOH-poo dji AH-gwuh."

Where English speakers slip

English speakers put the stress on the wrong syllable and say "ah-GWAH," which sounds like they're reading the Spanish "agua" — and the Spanish word genuinely is stressed there, which is why the transfer is so persistent. Portuguese stresses the first syllable: AH-gwuh. The other slip is dropping the article; "água" is feminine and takes "a," and the phrase is normally learned as a unit.