Usually the words that are close to Latin or Greek in Portuguese will have English equivalents (<- here's one!) that are also close to the Latin/Greek. So in a pinch for a word and trying to translate in your head, it's easier to remember the words with a smaller transformation from Portuguese to English than something very different. Some sort of compression coding of a translation dictionary inside of the brain :D

in Brazil the outskirts or suburbs of a city are called "periferia", and it might be that the person didn't know the english words for "lado" or "borda" so he used a close relative which is "periferia", sounds very plausible to me. nothing to do with fancy words, because "periferia" definetly ain't fancy (in pt)

> which sounds like Russian when spoken

Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.