Contact between Portuguese and Spanish: false friends in language textbooks

Abstract

The interest in the research on the linguistic contact between Portuguese and Spanish, both in Europe and Brazil, as far as foreign language teaching – both in the translation and lexicography areas – is concerned, has been on the increase, with lexicon being one of the most important areas. Within the latter, the so-called “false friends” are one of the elements which have led to the most significant number of studies regarding the contrastive analysis between the two languages. It is the purpose of this article to examine the presence and the presentation of false friends in the textbooks of Portuguese as a foreign language for Spanish speakers.