3 September 2009: East Timor (Timor Leste) becomes the fifth country to ratify the Portuguese orthographic accord

Here's something I missed from last week. You may have read about the Portuguese Orthographic Accord, which was originally from 1990 but wasn't ratified by Portuguese-speaking countries until recently for some reason. It's important for a language like Portuguese which has a fair amount of geographic extent, but many less-developed countries that use it that aren't really helped by the existence of different standards. With this, East Timor has become the fifth member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (Comunidade de Países de língua Portuguesa, or CPLP) to ratify this, along with Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe.