Since the end of the 19th century, Portuguese immigration, composed mainly of populations from the Atlantic islands of the Azores, Madeira, was concentrated in some of the largest industrial cities in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, such as New Bedford, Fall River, MA, and Providence, RI. (Pap, The Portuguese Americans, 1981). However, these immigrants also settled to a lesser extent in two smaller cities close to Boston: Cambridge and Somerville (Ito-Adler, The Portuguese in Cambridge & Somerville, 1980). Here, the most expressive Portuguese visibility is concentrated in a small area crossing the border between these two cities. Despite the transformations of deindustrialization and gentrification that took place there since the last three decades, Portuguese ancestry still depicts the sociocultural landscape of this area which hosts a small, yet visible, Azorean-American community.Azorean-American ethnicity remains largely undocumented and understudied in Cambridge and Somerville. Yet, signs and symbols of a uniquely Azorean presence persevere in this territory of rapid change, defined by gentrification threatening this community’s existence. These markings range from associations, religious organizations, churches, processions, celebrations, flags, car stickers, supermarket products, photo albums, intimate family recipes, meals, and forms of Azorean-American speech, among others. Our research aims to deepen knowledge about this process of urban transformation along three interrelated dimensions:a)    Sociolinguistics: an analysis of the linguistic landscape of the Portuguese language in this territory within the specific Azorean contexts of language and prestige, in more public or more intimate family contexts (the home, festivities, school, work, etc.), in part through an auto-ethnography of a Portuguese language instructor.b)    Transnationalism: identification of the current connections between the neighborhood and abroad, focused on the biogr...

This project seeks to analyze the diversity of the uses and representations of the Portuguese language in the Boston area, in which there exists great linguistic and socio-cultural diversity. With the general objective of rethinking this pluricentric language as a resource for communication and identity, we intend to contribute to the general understanding of its internal diversity through an ethnographic and sociolinguistic approach by questioning associated linguistic categories, beliefs, and prejudices. The fact that Portuguese is currently the third most spoken language in the state of Massachusetts (US Census 2010, thereby holding a unique position in the context of the United States), as a result of successive waves of immigration, the oldest being Azorean and Cape Verdean to the more recent Brazilian, makes its study in an intensely urban region characterized by a cultural and linguistic “superdiversity” particularly challenging. The dialectal variation of Portuguese appears in a particularly expressive way and is sometimes concentrated in small territories where the range of variants in use extends beyond the two officially recognized standard forms of European and Brazilian Portuguese variants. Research Team:  Graça Índias Cordeiro (CIES-IUL) Giuseppe Formato (Lesley University, Cambridge, MA)