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 that one’s vavó seems to sound as if she were one’s vavô and one’s vavô winds up with his own curious phonetic rendering as vavú.

Add to all this a penchant for neglecting the latter half of diphthongs (chapeu > chapé) and lopping off any final unstressed vowel that doesn’t happen to be “a” and, well...

It can all become mighty confusing. For those whose Portuguese is more tightly aligned with the standard language as spoken in places such as Lisbon, Coimbra, or – well, any of the other Azorean islands (except, perhaps, for Santa Maria) – the speech patterns of many micaelenses seem to cross a line into something that stretches the limit of what some would call “Portuguese.”

It would appear to be something other than “real Portuguese,” a bedeviled linguistic cacophony spoken exclusively by folks who might refer to themselves as the world’s sole source of coriscos.

As a result of their linguistically distinctive behaviors, the people of São Miguel have quite often found themselves ridiculed and scorned by those who have found the dialect somehow deficient or substandard.