Brazilians Use Sunday First

Almost all calendars in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, have Sunday as the first day of the week, because this is baked into the language itself. Portuguese, along with Galician and Mirandese, are the only Romance languages where, instead of the names of the weekdays being derived from the pagan planetary gods, they are derived simply from numbers, numbered from Sunday.

Example Brazilian calendar.

The names for the days of the week literally just mean “the Lord’s day”, “second-day”, “third-day”, “fourth-day”, “fifth-day”, “sixth-day” and “sabbath”. So calendars follow along with this, it feels wrong not to. In English, it is sometimes disputed that Sunday should not be first because then there is no singular “weekend”, there are two “ends” of the week at Saturday and Sunday. But we just use the equivalent expression and assume it refers to the “work week”.

Regarding the weekend, as in many other Romance languages, the word for Saturday is literally the same word used to talk about the Sabbath, while the word for Sunday is a word that just means Sunday, but is etymologically derived from Latin for “lord”.

Regarding the weekdays, the word used for “day” within the ordinal weekdays is “feira”, which comes from Latin “feria” meaning a day, but in modern Portuguese does not mean a day at all outside of these fixed weekday names, it means a street fair. Many children are confused why there are so many street fairs in the calendar, and often they don’t even get an explanation, they just stop asking about it.

Although it is so confusing, the word “feira” has the advantage of being feminine, unlike the normal word for day, “dia”, which is masculine. So it is in fact impossible to confuse the second-day (Monday) with the second day (e.g. of the month), since the latter is masculine.

Portuguese does have a descendant of “feria” from Latin in actual uncompounded use, which is the word “férias” (almost always plural) referring to a vacation. I like to use the Phineas & Ferb theme song as an example of that word: the initial line “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” was rendered in Portuguese as “são três meses de férias, que passam depressa”, which, translated back, means “there are three months of vacations, which pass by quickly”. (The additional clause, about “passing by quickly”, was inserted to fit the meter, because otherwise the line would be too short. And I guess they made it “three months” to make the song more plausible with regard to Brazilian school schedules.)

The word for “third” within Tuesday (terça-feira) is actually usually only used for a third as in the fraction (one-third is “um terço” in the masculine and “uma terça” in the feminine) in modern Portuguese, whereas for the ordinal third you usually say a different word (the third ordinal place is called “terceiro” in the masculine and “terceira” in the feminine).