Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "o bebê" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

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

o bebê is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /u beˈbe/. It means “baby.” oo beh-BEH, with the stress on the second syllable and a tight closed vowel at the end.

oo beh-BEH, with the stress on the second syllable and a tight closed vowel at the end.

o bebê /u beˈbe/

The circumflex is doing double duty: it moves the stress to the final syllable, which is a real exception since a word ending in -e would normally be front-stressed, and it simultaneously fixes the vowel as closed. Remove the accent and you'd have neither piece of information.

Listen: o bebê

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Sound it out

o "oo." Worth noting that the noun stays masculine regardless of the baby's sex, so this article doesn't change for a girl.

be A b formed with the lips fully closing and a closed e, unstressed. Portuguese distinguishes b and v strictly, unlike Spanish, so this must be a genuine stop.

bê The same consonant and vowel again, now accented. The circumflex marks the stress and specifies the closed quality — a tight "ay" rather than the open "eh" an acute would have indicated.

Hear it in a sentence

O bebê está dormindo.

The baby is sleeping.

Listen: O bebê está dormindo.

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"O bebê está dormindo" uses the present continuous with a gerund, and "dormindo" contains a syllable-final r as a rasp plus a nasal in the middle. In speech "está" reduces to "tá," so the whole sentence lands in about four spoken beats.

Where English speakers slip

Front-stressing it as "BEH-beh" is the English instinct and it ignores the accent entirely. Push the weight to the end. Spanish speakers bring "bebé" with an acute, which marks an open vowel — Portuguese uses a circumflex here precisely because its vowel is closed, so the accent mark itself differs between the two languages.