Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

mas is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /mas/. It means “but.” MAHSS, with a plain open "ah" — no glide. Keep it clearly distinct from "mais," which sounds like "mice."

MAHSS, with a plain open "ah" — no glide. Keep it clearly distinct from "mais," which sounds like "mice."

mas /mas/

One syllable, unaccented, and in practice lightly stressed — it's a conjunction hinging two clauses rather than a content word. In rapid speech Brazilians reduce it further, and the boundary between "mas" and "mais" genuinely blurs, which is why listeners rely on the grammar of the sentence to disambiguate them.

Listen: mas

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Sound it out

ma An ordinary m and a wide-open "ah," jaw dropped and tongue low. There's no diphthong here at all, which is the entire difference from its lookalike "mais."

s A clean final hiss, voicing to z before a following vowel. Because "mas" so often introduces a clause starting with a pronoun, you'll hear that z-linking regularly: "mas eu" becomes "mah-ZEW."

Hear it in a sentence

Eu quero ir, mas não posso.

I want to go, but I can't.

Listen: Eu quero ir, mas não posso.

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"Eu quero ir, mas não posso" pivots on this word, and everything after it is negated. Notice "não posso" — the nasal diphthong of "não" running into a double s that stays unvoiced, giving "nowng-POH-soo." The comma in writing corresponds to a real slight pause in speech, which is unusual for Portuguese punctuation.

Where English speakers slip

The main hazard is the "mais" collision: saying "mice" when you mean "but" produces a sentence that means something quite different. Keep the vowel simple. English speakers also tend to stress the conjunction heavily, as we do with "but," whereas Brazilians throw it away and put the weight on the clause after it.