Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

em is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ẽj̃/. It means “in / at.” AYNG — a nasal diphthong, not the letters "em." Your lips stay open the whole time.

AYNG — a nasal diphthong, not the letters "em." Your lips stay open the whole time.

em /ẽj̃/

A monosyllabic preposition, unstressed in practice and leaning on the noun after it. Like other prepositions it contracts freely with articles — em plus o gives "no," em plus a gives "na," em plus um gives "num" — and Brazilians use those contracted forms far more often than the bare "em."

Listen: em

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Sound it out

e The vowel begins as a closed e, roughly the vowel of "say," but nasalized from the start — air escaping through the nose while you shape it in the mouth.

m Not pronounced as a consonant. It marks the nasal quality and produces a glide: the vowel slides toward a nasalized y, giving that distinctive "ayng" shape. If your lips come together, you've added a sound that isn't there.

Hear it in a sentence

Ela trabalha em um hospital.

She works in a hospital.

Listen: Ela trabalha em um hospital.

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"Ela trabalha em um hospital" is written with "em um" separate, but almost every Brazilian would say "num" out loud. The h in "hospital" is completely silent, so the phrase ends "oo-nos-pee-TAOW" with the final l vocalized to a w — an ordinary sentence turning out to contain three separate reductions.

Where English speakers slip

Saying "em" with the lips closing on an m is the reflex from English spelling and it's wrong. There's no m consonant here. Beginners also miss the glide: the sound isn't a flat nasal "eh" but a moving one that ends higher, toward "eeng." And once you learn the contractions, resist over-using bare "em" — natives contract almost everywhere they can.