In the United States languages other than English are often perceived as foreign, yet many born in America possess strong cultural connections to languages. These languages are not foreign to those individuals; rather, they are familiar in an assortment of ways: some speak, read, and write the language, while others only speak or understand when spoken to, and many may not understand, but have family or reside in a community where the language is spoken. Throughout the process of heritage language loss, each generation reveals a different level of investment, preservation, and maintenance of Portuguese in New England. Although heritage language can be used to describe any number of connections between a nondominant language and an individual, family, or community, the term heritage language learner describes a person who is studying a language and may possess some proficiency in or a cultural literacy of that language of study. Portuguese Americans may have been raised with strong cultural ties to a specific linguistic variant through familial contact as language learners, and not as speakers with an intrinsic motivation stemming from their heritage. This paper calls attention to these potential heritage learners who are overlooked by both US educational structures and Portuguese language policies from Portugal which claim as a goal to maintain Portuguese language and culture in diasporic communities. We believe that the current, narrow Portuguese language teaching model comprising only two dominant variants, taught as foreign language, provides no space and often inhospitable environments for Portuguese Americans and their socio-linguistic realities. Through interdisciplinary research combining sociolinguistics, ethnography, and history we approach Greater Boston and its Portuguese “intrinsic blending of space and time” (Blommaert, 2015:114) by discussing how spaces of belonging and negotiation are constructed in “spatial, temporal, and ideological spaces of sociolinguistic hybridity and diversity”, or sociolinguistic borderlands (McCarty, 2014).

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