Portugal’s parliament has voted to phase in over six years changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way, as reported in a BBC News story. 

The agreement standardizes numerous spellings and adds the letters k, w, and y to the alphabet. Silent consonants will be deleted to spell words more phonetically. For example, "optimo" (great) would become "otimo."

Seven Portuguese-speaking countries agreed on a unified form of Portuguese in 1991. More than 230 million people live in the eight countries that constitute the CPLP, the Community of Countries of the Portuguese Language (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa): Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and of course Portugal itself, which has approximately 10 million speakers.