Você é humano ou animal?

What does “mano” mean in Brazilian Portuguese?

Mano is what Brazilians call a friend, a stranger, or an annoying sibling: roughly “bro” or “dude.” It is irmão (“brother”) with the front chopped off, and it kept the warmth of the original — dropping a mano into a sentence signals you are on easy terms. The feminine mana works the same way, and manos covers a whole group.

Recorded as an affectionate word between actual siblings since the nineteenth century, mano is strongly associated with São Paulo street/youth speech and popularized through rap — the frontman of Racionais MC’s is literally Mano Brown. Tone does the work: Mano, que isso? ranges from delighted to exasperated. Portugal reaches for pá or meu instead.