European Portuguese (, ), also known as Portuguese of Portugal (Portuguese: português de Portugal), Iberian Portuguese (Portuguese: português ibérico), and Peninsular Portuguese (Portuguese: português peninsular), refers to the dialects of the Portuguese language spoken in Portugal. The word "European" was chosen to avoid the clash of "Portuguese Portuguese" ("") as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese. Portuguese is a pluricentric language; it is the same language with several interacting codified standard forms in many countries. Portuguese is a Latin-based language with Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Arabic influence. It was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before as Galician-Portuguese. With the formation of Portugal as a country in the 12th century, the language evolved into Portuguese. In the Spanish province of Galicia to the north of Portugal, the native language is Galician. Both Portuguese and Galician are very similar and natives can understand each other as they share the same recent common ancestor. Portuguese and Spanish are different languages, although they share 89% of their lexicon. European Portuguese is notable among Romance languages in that it is stress-timed, rather than syllable-timed; in this respect it differs even from Brazilian Portuguese. Phonology Vowel classification Portuguese uses vowel height to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables; the vowels tend to be raised to when they are unstressed (see below for details). The dialects of Portugal are characterized by reducing vowels to a greater extent than others. Falling diphthongs are composed of a vowel followed by one of the high vowels or ; although rising diphthongs occur in the language as well, they can be interpreted as hiatuses. European Portuguese possesses quite a wide range of vowel allophones: All vowels are lowered and retracted before . All vowels are raised and advanced before alveolar, palato-alveolar and palatal consonants. Word-finally, as well as unstressed and are voiceless . The realization of this contrast occurs in a limited morphological context, namely in verbs conjugation between the first person plural present and past perfect indicative forms of verbs such as ('we think') and ('we thought'). proposes that it is a kind of crasis rather than phonemic distinction of and . It means that in 'we speak' there is the expected prenasal -raising: , while in 'we spoke' there are phonologically two in crasis: . Close-mid vowels and open-mid vowels ( and ) contrast only when they are stressed. In unstressed syllables, they occur in complementary distribution. According to Mateus and