Brazilian Portuguese the last decades of the 20th century, due to the popularity of Brazilian music and Brazilian soap operas. Since Brazil joined Mercosul, the South American free trade zone, Portuguese has been increasingly studied as a foreign language in Spanish-speaking partner countries. Many words of Brazilian origin (also used in other Portuguese-speaking countries) have also entered into English: samba, bossa nova, cruzeiro, milreis and capoeira. While originally Angolan, the word "samba" only became famous worldwide because of its popularity in Brazil. After independence in 1822, Brazilian idioms with African and Amerindian influences were brought to Portugal by returning Portuguese Brazilians ("luso-brasileiros"
Brazilian Portuguese it shows noticeable regional variations in pronunciation. The main and most general (i.e. not considering various regional variations) characteristics of the informal variant of BP are the following. To be noted that these characteristics are also present in other varieties of Portuguese: Modern linguistic studies have shown that Brazilian Portuguese is a topic-prominent or topic- and subject-prominent language. Sentences with topic are extensively used in Portuguese, perhaps more in Brazilian Portuguese most often by means of turning an element (object or verb) in the sentence into an introductory phrase, on which the body of the sentence constitutes a comment (topicalization),