Portal:Brazil/Selected article/9

Museum of the Portuguese Language
Credit: Indech

The Museum of the Portuguese Language (Portuguese: Museu da Língua Portuguesa) is an interactive museum about the Portuguese language in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The museum is contained within the Estação da Luz train station, in the Luz district. The museum is located above the train platform, where 300,000 people pass each day. It was conceived by the São Paulo Secretary of Culture in conjunction with the Roberto Marinho Foundation, at a cost of around 37 million reais (14.5 million euros).

The objective of the museum is to create a living representation of the Portuguese language, where visitors may be surprised and educated by unusual and unfamiliar aspects of their own native language. Secondly, the caretakers of the museum, as expressed on the museum website "desire that, in this museum, the public has access to new knowledge and reflection, in an intense and pleasurable manner". The museum targets the whole Brazilian population, made up of people from many regions and social backgrounds, but who still have not had the opportunity to gain a broader understanding of the origins, the history and the continuous evolution of the language.