New England has been one of the major migratory destinations for the Portuguese, predominanetly from the Azores, who first began arriving over 150 years ago. Their destitations included multicultural and multilingual metropolitan areas, such as the Boston area. It is therefor not surprising, that a linguistic contact variant, heavily influenced by the Portuguese spoken on the island of São Miguel has consolidated in this region, and is a product of multiple and quite complex generational, local and transnational interactions. Many descendants of these Portuguese, existing in these Portuguese-speaking communities, enroll in Portuguese language courses, as a way of developing their bi or plurilingual sociolinguistic identity. They are however faced with a teaching model of 'Portuguese as a foreign language' void of connection with to its local realities, and worse, with are presented with an attitude of stigmatizing devaluation of the variant that is familiar to them, resulting in many of these heritage learners to disengage from such courses. This is the starting point for a reflexive analysis of the sociolinguistic tensions that permeate the teaching of European Portuguese in diasporic contexts, tied to a strong ideology of a single, standard language - monocultural, monolingual, classist, nationalist and even neo-colonial - which does not recognize the local variants as legitimate, and thereby rejecting the internal diversity of Portuguese as a constituent of the sociolinguistic heritage of 'emigrant' communities.

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