> What's the most commonly spoken language in the Southern hemisphere?And the answer is: Portuguese The Southern hemisphere contains about a third of the Earth's land, with about11% of the world's population. The most spoken language is Portuguese, which isan official language in Brazil, followed by Spanish and Javanese. Portuguese is an ancient language. It initially developed in Portugal afterRoman settlers introduced Latin to Portugal in third century BCE. It wasn'tuntil 1290 that the language became distinct from an evolution of Latin andassumed the title "Portuguese". Nowadays, Portugal occupies only a smallfraction of the world's Portuguese speakers. The majority reside in Brazil: 99%of the 207 million residents speak Portuguese. There are more Portuguesespeakers in Brazil than all other Portuguese speaking countries combined!Fun fact:Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese didn't share spelling conventionsuntil 1990. When Brazil declared their independence from Portugal in 1822, thegeological distance ultimately led to two different systems of grammaticalconvention. It wasn't until 1990 that both countries signed the OrthographicAgreement of 1990, agreeing to standardize and therefore better organize thelanguage. In 2009, however, another amendment[https://www.unitedlanguagegroup.com/blog/brazilian-portuguese-spelling-reform] was passed to the unified language that added three letters (K, W, and Y) to thePortuguese alphabet. That means the language is still evolving, and has been forthousands of years!