Diminutives: -inho and -zinho

Diminutives are common in Brazilian conversation, and they do much more than describe size. They can soften an invitation or bad news, turn fast into really fast, or make an interaction sound warmer. English also has diminutives such as doggy and birdie, and uses phrases such as just a minute or a little problem to soften speech; Portuguese uses these suffixes more widely. Hearing -inho as only babytalk can lead you to take um probleminha at face value when a Brazilian has just told you something is wrong. Building the forms is only part of the task. The useful skill is hearing what they are doing.

Choosing -inho or -zinho

The word ending is a useful starting point. These are common patterns for -inho / -zinho, not rules that exclude every other form:

The noun keeps its gender. Casa is feminine, so it is a casinha; livro is masculine, so it is o livrinho. The ending alone does not reliably tell you the gender: um probleminha is masculine despite -inha.

Literal smallness

• «Eles moram numa casinha azul perto do mar.» (They live in a little blue house near the sea.)

• «Comprei um presentinho para você.» (I bought you a little present.)

• «O menino desenhou um solzinho no papel.» (The boy drew a little sun on the paper.)

• «Tem um cachorrinho na porta da loja.» (There is a little dog at the shop door.)

Softening what comes next

• «Só um minutinho, já estou indo.» (Just a minute, I am on my way.)

• «Posso fazer uma perguntinha?» (Can I ask a quick question?)

• «A gente tem um probleminha com a sua conta.» (We have a small problem with your bill.)

• «Foi só um errinho de nada.» (It was just a tiny mistake.)

The gender never moves, even when the ending suggests otherwise

Problema is masculine, so its diminutive is too: um probleminha, never ✗ uma probleminha. It works in the other direction as well — mão is feminine, so it is a mãozinha. The suffix takes whatever ending it needs and leaves the gender exactly where it was.

-zinho after a consonant

Words ending in -l, -r or -m often take the long form: mulherzinha, papelzinho, animalzinho, but there are variants. In these examples, final -m becomes -n in writing: homem → homenzinho, bom → bonzinho, which is how you describe someone kind.

devagarinho, sozinho and todinho

Devagar ends in a consonant but can take the short form: devagarinho. This is one reason not to treat the ending patterns as absolute. Sozinho is based on só, which still means "alone" or "only" in everyday use; todinho adds emphasis to todo, meaning "every last bit".

Names go small and stay there

João → Joãozinho, Ana → Aninha, Carlos → Carlinhos, José → Zezinho. These nicknames can persist into adulthood; in Brazil they turn up on business cards and on ballot papers.

Brazil's 1994 World Cup squad had two Ronaldos, and the suffixes sorted them out. The defender Ronaldo Rodrigues de Jesus became Ronaldão and the seventeen-year-old striker Ronaldo Nazário became Ronaldinho — an augmentative and a diminutive doing the work of surnames. When a third Ronaldo broke through at the 1999 Copa América, the diminutive moved across to him, and he had to be told apart in turn as Ronaldinho Gaúcho. Sources: CBF, Revista PLACAR

Linguists have not finished arguing about the ending you just learned. A 2013 study in the journal Alfa ran acceptability tests on Brazilian speakers and found that the choice between -inho and -zinho is not settled by the rule alone: regional dialect, age group and gender all interact in which form people accept. Two years earlier, in Estudos Linguísticos, Maximiliano Guimarães and Gesoel Mendes argued that -inh- is not a suffix at all but an infix — something that lands inside the word rather than on the end of it. Sources: SciELO — Alfa, Estudos Linguísticos