Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

eu is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ew/. It means “I.” One syllable — the "e" of "they" gliding into a quick "oo." It is emphatically not English "you."

One syllable — the "e" of "they" gliding into a quick "oo." It is emphatically not English "you."

eu /ew/

A one-syllable word, and Portuguese one-syllable pronouns like this one carry real stress in a sentence rather than reducing the way English "I" often does in fast speech. Even so, no written accent is needed: with nothing to compete with, the vowel takes the weight by default.

Listen: eu

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Sound it out

e A closed e, roughly the vowel in "café" without the drawn-out English diphthong. Keep the tongue high and the sound tight; a slack "eh" as in "bed" makes the word sound wrong immediately.

u This u is a lip-rounded glide, the "w" you hear at the end of "how" but starting from a front vowel. Round the lips as you finish the e and stop — don't add a full "oo" beat.

Hear it in a sentence

Eu sou a Ana.

I am Ana.

Listen: Eu sou a Ana.

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"Eu sou a Ana" stacks two of these w-glide vowels back to back — "eu" and "sou" — and Brazilians run them together into something like "ew-SOH." Note also that "sou" ends in the ou spelling, which in Brazil flattens to a plain "oh" with no trailing "oo," so the two words don't actually rhyme the way the spelling suggests.

Where English speakers slip

The overwhelming instinct is to read the letters as English "e-u" and land on "YOO" or "EE-yoo." There's no y-sound anywhere in this word — it starts with a plain vowel. A second trap is separating the two letters into "EH-oo," two clean beats; Brazilians fuse them so tightly that "eu" is barely longer than English "ay."