How to Pronounce 'Nós': Portuguese (Brazil) Pronunciation Guide

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

nós is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /nɔs/. It means “we / us.” NAWSS, with an open o like the vowel in "thought." One syllable, and the accent tells you which o to use.

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

NAWSS, with an open o like the vowel in "thought." One syllable, and the accent tells you which o to use.

nós /nɔs/

A monosyllable would normally go unaccented, so the acute here is doing vowel-quality work rather than stress work — it's telling you the o is open. It also distinguishes the pronoun from "nos," the unstressed object form meaning "us," which has a closed raised vowel and sounds like "noos." One accent mark separates two very common words.

Listen: nós

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Sound it out

n A plain n with the tongue on the ridge behind the teeth. It's a genuine consonant here, not a nasalization marker, and the vowel that follows stays completely oral.

ó The acute accent specifies the open o: jaw down, lips loosely rounded, closer to "law" than "low." Portuguese uses the acute for open vowels and the circumflex for closed ones, and this word needs the distinction spelled out.

s A final hiss that voices to a z when a vowel follows, so "nós estamos" runs together as "naw-zish-TAH-moos."

Hear it in a sentence

Nós moramos aqui.

We live here.

Listen: Nós moramos aqui.

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"Nós moramos aqui" doubles up the information: the pronoun says "we" and the verb ending -amos says "we" again. That redundancy is why Brazilians so often drop the pronoun, or replace the whole construction with "a gente mora aqui," which takes a third-person verb and is far more common in everyday speech.

Where English speakers slip

Closing the vowel to "nohss" is the most frequent error and it collides with the object pronoun "nos." Keep the jaw open. The bigger practical issue is usage: learners drill "nós" and its -amos endings, then arrive in Brazil to find that almost everyone says "a gente" instead, with a singular verb. Both are correct; only one is what you'll actually hear.