Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "ao" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

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

ao is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /aw/. It means “to the (m.).” OW, one syllable, rhyming with "cow." It's the preposition a fused with the article o, and the fusion is total.

OW, one syllable, rhyming with "cow." It's the preposition a fused with the article o, and the fusion is total.

ao /aw/

One syllable, and in a sentence it's a light one — the contraction leans onto the noun that follows. It's worth seeing the paradigm: a + o gives "ao," a + a gives "à" with a grave accent, a + os gives "aos," a + as gives "às." All four are pronounced as short, quick preludes to the noun.

Listen: ao

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Sound it out

a The open "ah" that starts the diphthong — jaw down, tongue low. It carries most of the sound's duration before handing off to the glide.

o Here the o is a w glide rather than a full vowel, so the pair reads as one beat. It does not get the "oo" raising that a standalone article o would receive, because it isn't a syllable of its own.

Hear it in a sentence

Vou ao mercado.

I'm going to the market.

Listen: Vou ao mercado.

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"Vou ao mercado" shows why the contraction exists: "vou a o mercado" would stack three vowel sounds in a row, and Portuguese collapses them. The verb "vou" itself ends in the ou spelling flattened to a plain "oh," so the phrase runs "voh-ow-mer-KAH-doo" with the two rounded sounds nearly touching.

Where English speakers slip

Learners pronounce the two letters separately as "ah-oh," giving two beats where there is one. It's a single diphthong. The other problem is grammatical: forgetting to contract at all and writing "a o," which is not acceptable Portuguese. Spanish speakers have an easier time recognizing the concept, since Spanish does the same thing with "al," but the Portuguese result sounds nothing like it.