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Anybody who has had the opportunity to visit the island of São Miguel and converse with the locals can’t help be struck by some extremely remarkable speech patterns.

There’s the French-sounding “u” in words such as fruta, lula, tudo and uma, as well as the German-like ö pronunciation in forms such as couve, pouco, oito, and noite.

Then there’s there are English-esque vowels in words such as sete or festa (often pronounced with a short-a sound, as in “sat” and “fasht-uh”).

And even when the vowels are, in themselves, Portuguese-sounding-enough, it often seems as they have been somehow misaligned, such …

English:

Several authors have described the variety of Portuguese spoken on the island of São Miguel (Azores,) but the speech of the Micaelans has never been analyzed from a contemporary sociolinguistic perspective. In this work, we present a quantitative analysis of the dialect of the village of Northeast (São Miguel), in which a vowel system is revealed whose variation oscillates between the island pronunciations of the tonic vowels and the corresponding forms of the Portuguese standard language. For example, while all the informants in the corpus pronounced the vowel tonic u as the previous high vowel rounded [y] (as u …