Why does Portuguese sound Russian?

No, I don't agree with the tywo answers.

You are right when Portuguese is spoken fast it sounds like a Slavic language i.e Russian or Polish

This is because of the consonants. Naturally written Portuguese is close to Spanish.

Hope this helps

Many of the above answers are correct, it does sound like Russian. Some answers try to explain the similarities but they don't explain why we sound so different from Spanish.

The reason is that around 60% of Portuguese are of Celt origin and 10% are Germanic. This majority has distorted the Latin derived language to a more guttural, closed sound, with some phonetics that do not come from Latin.

Spain, on the other hand, has a lot more Moorish percentage of the population.

Dr.RLux has given a good answer, and perhaps I can expand on it a bit: Though the two languages are not closely related, Portuguese probably sounds Russian (or in general, Slavic) to some listeners because both languages contain a large inventory of fricatives and affricates. "Fricatives" and "affricates" are speech sounds that are produced (or partly produced) by constricting together two articulators (i.e. lips, teeth, tongue, palate, etc.) and forcibly blowing air between them (which creates friction and produces a sound that might be described as "hissing" in some way). Examples of such sounds are the 'ss,' 'z,' 'sh,' 's,' 'ch,' and 'dg' sounds in the words "grassy," "hazy," "ashy," "leisure," "cachy," and "edgy" respectively. All these sounds (spelled differently of course) are common in Portuguese. In addition, Portuguese has palatal consonants (the 'lh' and 'nh') and often drops vowels in unstressed syllables, especially European Portuguese. All these aspects can make Portuguese sound Slavic to people who do not speak a Slavic language simply because these people associate those characteristics with Slavic languages.

Hope that helps. :)

- strong reduction of unstressed vowels, but without tense articulation as in German and, to a lesser degree, English

- the hard "sh" (as opposed to the more alveolar one in English) and a marked presence of its voiced counterpart (s as in pleasure, but again, deeper on the palate).

I'd say Portuguese sounds Belarusian, which is roughly halfway between Russian and Polish, pronunciation-wise. But then again, if you're a speaker of any of the Slavic languages I've mentioned, Portuguese is like someone who has the same complexion and same hairstyle as your uncle or aunt. Similar, but there's no confusing once you look at the face.

I know exactly what you mean. It has to do with particular sounds where the mouth closes down and the tongue twists in a certain way.

Most people will say that the languages sound different . That's true except for the syllables that I talked about. They will admit it if they are made to listen more carefully.

Must be just you. Are you sure you're listening to something in Russian or Portuguese? Romance language? I think you mean latin.

Brazilian Portuguese or European Portuguese?

Portuguese has a lot of accents!

Are you sure you haven't just been listing to a Russian? They sound nothing alike.