What makes Portugal's situation unique is that it is a small population that is eclipsed in models by the bigger weights of the much bigger population of Brazil.

Yes, there are much smaller European countries, but those are generally the only source of truth for their specific language, so the context of a LLM query in that language steers the LLM towards facts from that country, for example, if I ask a big generic LLM something in Latvian then it most likely will answer something relevant to the context of Latvia. But Portugal, being the much smaller user of its language, have the somewhat unique problem that if I ask a generic model something in Portuguese it will probably answer something related to Brazil instead of Portugal.

Maybe the UK and Spain have somewhat similar struggles, but I suspect that none has it as bad as Portugal in that regard.

It is pretty small when considering content output. It is only 11 million people, and only a fraction of them will be writing something that could be used on training datasests. If you look at the countries by scientific contribution, for example [1], Portugal is on the 28th position, while Brazil is in 14th by more than double the number of contributions.

Don't get me wrong, it is definitely impressive given Portugal's actual size, but I believe there's a hard limit for population and size that will be difficult to cross

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

> European Portuguese is the 13th most populous language in Europe

that's not impressive

The authors are pretty clearly trying to draw only from European Portuguese sources - I feel like there's a fairly widespread attitude here that the language is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Brazilian speakers (which there is obviously at least some truth to).

I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be prickly about the meteoric rise of US English)

Portugal has a growing Xenophobic attitude towards immigrants, specially Brazilians and this is reflected in linguistic prejudice.

They have concerns of portuguese children learning to "speak brazillian" because there is a lot more of video content being produced in Brasil than in Portugal and stuff like movies, videogames and software in general are avaliable in brazilian localization/adaptation first.

Right, but most of those speak brazilian portuguese. There's so much less european portuguese text that it becomes impossible for a model to not speak brazilian portuguese if not trained in a way that ignores brazilian sources

The whole point of this project is to have an LLM that speaks European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese.

Mutually intelligible, yes, but far from perfectly so. I speak both, as a native anglophone, and the difference is not so much “US vs British English” so much as “Guyanese English vs British English”. Like, fundamental points of grammar differ, the spoken rhythm and syllabic stress differs (poetry does not translate well between them), never mind just vocabulary. Continental Portuguese people tend to find it easier to understand brasileiros than vice versa, largely due to mostly one-way cultural exports, but to try to roll both into a single model would create a creole at best.