European Portuguese has expressed interest in joining the CPLP as an associate observer pending permission from the Spanish government. Portugal maintained its colonial rule over its Old World empire much longer than it did over Brazil. Thus European Portuguese is used as a norm of reference for African and Asian Lusophone countries (Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe). Portugal remains a destination for post-secondary education for the elites of these places. In Europe, European Portuguese remains the learning standard for Portuguese as a second language. The Instituto Camões is an organization which promotes not only
Proto-language system of isoglosses which held together dialects which were spoken by various tribes, from which the historically attested Indo-European languages emerged. Proto-language A proto-language, in the tree model of historical linguistics, is a language, usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and usually unattested, from which a number of attested known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested "daughter languages". It is therefore equivalent with the "ancestral language" or "parental language" of