Family and possession in Brazilian Portuguese

Level A1

Family and possession in Brazilian Portuguese

You are introducing family members to a visitor and identifying a book and a table. Choose meu/minha or seu/sua to match the person or thing named; use dele/dela to make a third-person owner clear.

Three relatives and two familiar objects

Listen to mãe (mother), pai (father) and irmã (sister). Irmã does not distinguish older from younger sisters. Recover o livro (the book, masculine) and a mesa (the table, feminine): o and a are the familiar definite articles. The family words are a mãe, o pai and a irmã.

Recall eu (I), você (you, one person), ele (he) and ela (she). É is the form of ser used here for “is”; no new verb table is needed.

Ask who someone is

One visitor points to two different people; the family member answers. Quem means “who”, so Quem é? asks “Who is it?” when the person is clear from context. Listen to the question and the answers.

Esta é minha irmã means “This is my sister”; Este é meu pai means “This is my father”. Este is masculine and esta feminine here, matching the person introduced, rather than the speaker. These are usable introduction forms; Brazilian speech also often uses esse/essa in such introductions, without requiring a rigid distance distinction here.

My: match the noun

Meu and minha both mean “my”: meu pai, meu livro; minha mãe, minha irmã, minha mesa. Choose the form according to the noun, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. The same matching gives Este é meu livro (This is my book) and Esta é minha mesa (This is my table).

Listen to Esta é minha mãe (This is my mother) and change just the family word using the models. An article before a possessive is often optional in Brazilian Portuguese: minha irmã and a minha irmã can both be used. Here the introduction examples leave it out.

Este / Esta é meu / minha pessoa / objeto

Ask the visitor: your book or your table?

When speaking to someone as você, use seu with livro and sua with mesa: É o seu livro? (Is that your book?) and É a sua mesa? (Is that your table?). These questions keep the ordinary statement order, with question intonation; Portuguese needs no equivalent of English do. The articles o/a and the possessives seu/sua match the noun, not the visitor’s gender.

In these questions the context makes the owner “you”. Elsewhere seu/sua can also mean “his” or “her”; their ending does not tell you who owns the object. The next examples make that owner explicit.

É o / a seu / sua objeto?

Make the owner clear: his or hers

Dele means “of him / his”, and dela means “of her / hers”: de + ele becomes dele, and de + ela becomes dela. O livro é dele means “The book is his”; O livro é dela means “The book is hers”. In this pattern dele/dela come after é; they can also follow the noun, as in o livro dele (his book).

Keep the owner fixed and change the object: O livro é dele / A mesa é dele; O livro é dela / A mesa é dela. Dele/dela do not change to match livro or mesa: they identify the male or female owner. When seu/sua leaves a third-person owner unclear, these forms clarify who is meant, provided that person is already identifiable.

O livro / A mesa é dele / dela.

Introduce someone and identify an object

Before listening to the answers below, try three short sentences: introduce your mother; ask the visitor whether the table is theirs; say that the book belongs to the woman you have just identified. Use only mãe, mesa and livro with the patterns above, then compare the three models in that order. To extend the exchange, introduce your father or sister and change the owner of the table. Remember: meu/minha and seu/sua match the noun, while dele/dela identify the owner. If you can ask Quem é? and give a short introduction, you can use this exchange with a few people or objects without drawing a whole family tree.

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