Laravel localization in Portuguese Português

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, Portuguese commonly uses: pt_PT, pt_BR, pt_AO, pt_MZ

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'pt',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('pt');

Plural rules: what Portuguese actually needs

CLDR defines 3 cardinal categories for Portuguese. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 2 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/pt/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for Portuguese (pt locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('pt');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "sábado, 21 março 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "sábado, 21 de março de 2026 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "21/03/2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "há 3 meses"

What to watch out for in Portuguese

• European (pt_PT) and Brazilian (pt_BR) Portuguese differ substantially in vocabulary, spelling, and address (tu vs você); treat them as separate targets.
• Nouns are gendered and adjectives agree in gender and number.
• Decimal comma with dot as thousands separator (1.234,56).

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in Portuguese by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add pt
php artisan lang:update