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

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

você is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /voˈse/. It means “you (singular, the everyday form; formal: o senhor / a senhora).” voh-SEH, stress on the end. The accented ê is a closed, tight "ay" — not the wide "eh" of "bed."

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

voh-SEH, stress on the end. The accented ê is a closed, tight "ay" — not the wide "eh" of "bed."

você /voˈse/

The circumflex on the final ê does double duty. It marks the stress on the last syllable, which is a genuine exception since a word ending in -e would normally be stressed on the second-to-last, and it simultaneously specifies the closed quality of the vowel. Drop the accent in writing and both pieces of information disappear.

Listen: você

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

vo A real v with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, then a short closed "oh." Unstressed but not swallowed; you should hear the vowel clearly before the c.

c Because it sits before an e, this c is a plain s sound, not a k. Portuguese follows the same soft-c rule as English does in "cell."

ê The circumflex tells you two things at once: this syllable is stressed, and the vowel is the closed variety — the sound in "they" with the y-glide chopped off, not the open "eh" you'd get with an acute accent.

Hear it in a sentence

Você quer um café?

Do you want a coffee?

Listen: Você quer um café?

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Você quer um café?" runs two accented final syllables into the same sentence — "você" and "café" — and both close on that same tight "eh" sound. In conversation Brazilians often clip "você" down to "cê," so you'll hear "cê quer um café?" constantly in speech even though nobody writes it that way.

Where English speakers slip

The most common wrong version is "VO-say" with English front stress and a drawn-out "ay" that glides off into a y. Portuguese holds the vowel steady and puts the weight at the end: "vo-SEH." A second issue is treating this word as formal because it looks like the Spanish "usted" in function — in Brazil it's the ordinary everyday "you," and the truly formal forms are "o senhor" and "a senhora."