This study calls attention to the diversity of Portuguese as a heritage language label in southern New England, focusing on the vanishing Azorean-American sociolinguistic heritage in the Greater Boston area. The researchers critically reflect on the attitudes regarding Azorean- American speech and ways in which such attitudes contribute, or not, to the survival of this local way of expression. Through a collaborative sociolinguistic and ethnographic research, this paper is based on the first author’s experience as a Portuguese teacher with a young heritage learners of Azorean ancestry in one of the last high schools to offer Portuguese language study in the Boston area, in addition to his experiences as a university lecturer, coupled with a second author’s long-term contact with the well-established Portuguese community of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. The authors are interested in analyzing how this non-standard or “informal” variety (Carvalho, 1925; Pap, 1949; Cabral, 1985) has survived within “spatial, temporal, and ideological spaces of sociolinguistic hybridity and diversity” (McCarty, 2014: 255), or “sociolinguistic borderlands”, and how marginality affects the transmission of this variety, particularly at the level of young heritage language learners of European Portuguese of Azorean ancestry, who seek to nurture their ethnolinguistic identity by learning this language. We thus analyze some of the conditions that continue to place the preservation of Azorean-American sociolinguistic identity at risk,

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Portuguese as heritage language,marginalization,Cambridge & Somerville,sociolinguistics & ethnography,Portuguese Azorean,linguistic ideologies

This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• Ethnic heritage in the shadows: a collaborative ethnography of Azorean American resilience in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, USA