Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

que is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ki/. It means “that / which.” KEE. The u is completely silent — it's there only to keep the q hard — and the e raises to an i.

KEE. The u is completely silent — it's there only to keep the q hard — and the e raises to an i.

que /ki/

As a relative pronoun or conjunction, "que" is unstressed and leans onto the clause it introduces, which is what keeps its vowel raised to i. Its accented sibling "quê" — used at the end of a question, as in "por quê?" — is stressed and takes a closed "ay" instead, so the accent mark is signalling a genuine sound change.

Listen: que

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Sound it out

qu Before e or i, the u in qu goes silent and the pair is simply a k sound. This is the opposite of "quatro," where the u before an a is fully pronounced as a w — the following vowel decides.

e Unstressed and word-final, so it raises to "ee." The word ends up sounding like the English word "key," which is a useful anchor since "que" appears in a huge share of Portuguese sentences.

Hear it in a sentence

Ela disse que vem.

She said she's coming.

Listen: Ela disse que vem.

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"Ela disse que vem" hangs a whole subordinate clause off this one syllable. "Disse" has a raised final e giving "DJEE-see," and "vem" is a nasal "veyng" with no closing consonant. Between them, "que" is barely more than a quick "kee" — Brazilians speed through it, and learning to skip lightly over it is part of sounding fluent.

Where English speakers slip

Beginners pronounce the u, producing "kweh," which is what the letters suggest to an English eye and what a Spanish speaker's habits reinforce for "qué." There's no w sound here at all. The second issue is holding the word too long: because it's grammatically important, learners give it weight, but native speakers reduce it almost to nothing between the words that matter.