This article is aimed at discussing sociolinguistic factors that are relevant to the teaching of Portuguese in the Spanish-Portuguese bilingual communities of northern Uruguay. It explores two of the main characteristics of these communities' linguistic repertoire: bilingualism and its consequences on the contact varieties, such as code-switching and grammatical convergence and patterns of internal linguistic variation, both in Portuguese and in Spanish. After contributing with a description of these communities' bilingual and multidialectal repertoires and arguing against the idea of monolingual and monostylistic speakers, the text brings a discussion on some premises that should be considered in the teaching of Portuguese in these communities, borrowing some pedagogical suggestions from the fields of first- and heritage-language teaching. Its final objective is to contribute to the development of a set of pedagogical principles that take students' sociolinguistic and cultural differences into account.
Uruguayan Portuguese; border Spanish; bilingualism; variation; sociolinguistics
