Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

e is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /i/. It means “and.” Pronounced "ee." A lone e meaning "and" is not "eh" in Brazil — it raises all the way to an i sound.

Pronounced "ee." A lone e meaning "and" is not "eh" in Brazil — it raises all the way to an i sound.

e /i/

As a conjunction it carries no stress at all — it's a hinge between two phrases and takes its rhythm from them. That unstressed status is what raises the vowel to "ee." Compare the accented "é," meaning "is," which is stressed and has an open "eh": the accent mark is the only thing on the page separating two extremely common words.

Listen: e

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Sound it out

e A single unstressed vowel letter that, in Brazilian speech, comes out as a high "ee." It's one of the shortest words in the language and one of the most frequently mispronounced by beginners reading it as written.

Hear it in a sentence

Eu e você somos amigos.

You and I are friends.

Listen: Eu e você somos amigos.

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"Eu e você somos amigos" puts "e" between two pronouns, and all three vowels run together in a smooth chain: "ew-ee-vo-SEH." There's no pause to mark the conjunction. "Somos" ends in an unstressed -os which Brazilians render "oos," and its s links into the vowel of "amigos" as a z.

Where English speakers slip

Reading it as "eh" is the standard error, and it creates real confusion because "eh" is what "é" means — "is." Saying "Ana eh Pedro" when you mean "Ana and Pedro" produces a genuinely different sentence. Keep the conjunction high and tight: "ee." Spanish speakers face the same trap in reverse, since Spanish "y" already sounds like "ee" but its cognate "e" does not.