Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

lá is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /la/. It means “there (over there).” LAH, one syllable, wide open. The accent is there to distinguish it from another word, not to move any stress.

LAH, one syllable, wide open. The accent is there to distinguish it from another word, not to move any stress.

lá /la/

A monosyllable would normally go unmarked, so the accent here is doing distinguishing work: it separates the adverb "lá" from the unstressed pronoun "la." Portuguese uses accents on one-syllable words fairly often for exactly this reason, as in "é" versus "e" and "nós" versus "nos."

Listen: lá

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Sound it out

l Tongue tip on the ridge for a full l. It stays completely articulated because there's no syllable here for it to close.

á A wide-open a, jaw down, tongue low — the vowel of "father." The acute accent confirms that openness and marks the word as stressed even though it has only one syllable.

Hear it in a sentence

Ele já está lá.

He is already there.

Listen: Ele já está lá.

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"Ele já está lá" stacks two accented monosyllables, "já" and "lá," both with wide-open a's, and in speech "está" reduces to "tá" — giving three open a's in a row across four words. It's a surprisingly rhythmic little sentence once the reduction kicks in.

Where English speakers slip

English speakers under-open the vowel and produce something closer to "luh," which barely registers as a word. Drop the jaw. The bigger issue is choosing between "lá" and "ali": "lá" implies real distance or somewhere out of sight, so pointing at a nearby chair and saying "lá" sounds odd to Brazilian ears.