International Lusophone Festival

Do You Know?

• The Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking countries) world is spread in nine countries across four continents, and Portuguese is the most widely-spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere.
  • from Vasco da Gama onwards, India’s Portuguese connection has not been diplomatically leveraged.

• Lusophone economies are among the fastest-growing in the world, with Brazil, Angola, Portugal, and Mozambique being some of them.
• India’s trade with the Lusophone world has grown six-fold in the last decade.

The Community of Portuguese Language Countries (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa)

• It is  also known as the Lusophone Commonwealth (Comunidade Lusofona)
• It is a multilateral forum, founded on 17 July 1996 at the 1st CPLP Heads of State & Government Summit in Lisbon. 
• The founding members were Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Sao Tome e Principe; while Timor Leste and Equatorial Guinea joined later. 
  • These 9 Lusophone countries comprise approximately 300 million people in 4 different continents (Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe).

• India joined CPLP as an associate observer in July 2021. 
  • As part of India’s engagement with CPLP, the Ministry of External Affairs celebrated the World Portuguese Language Day in Delhi on 5 May 2022, soon after joining CPLP.