How stable are early-acquired languages in contexts of migration and remigration?

In this talk, María Cristina Moreira Flores will discuss situations of drastic change in children's linguistic environment and how these changes affect the development of the bilingual children's language competences. One example of environment change, which frequently leads to the loss of contact with one of the children's (native) language, is the context of remigration (i.e. when a migrant family moves back to the country of origin). In these cases, bilingual children often lose exposure to the dominant language of the previous host country. Based on findings from studies on Portuguese returnees from Germany, she will demonstrate that a childhood language needs sufficient time and input in order to stabilize in the child's mind. An early loss of exposure to an early-acquired language may lead to severe effects of language loss. Bilingual children who moved to Portugal (from Germany) before the age of 11 years demonstrate unstable knowledge of German (within one year after remigration). She will discuss the implications of these findings for bilingual education.

Cristina María Moreira Flores is Associate Professor (with habilitation) for German Linguistics at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies/University of Minho. She obtained her PhD in 2008 in German Linguistics with a thesis on The syntactic competence of Portuguese-German returnees. A study on Language Attrition (UMinho+UHamburg). Her research focuses on bilingual language development, in particular on heritage language acquisition and language attrition. She has coordinated several projects on (Portuguese-German) bilingualism and L2 acquisition. She was Director of the Research Center on Humanities (2019-2022). Currently, she is director of the Double Degree Master on Portuguese-German Studies, board member of the PhD programme on Language Science and President of the Portuguese Linguistics Association. She is associate editor of Linguistic Approaches do Bilingualism (Benjamins), Heritage Language Journal, co-editor of the series Language Development (Narr Verlag). She was co-editor of the journal REAL (Revista de Estudos Germanísticos) and the journal Diacrítica (CEHUM). She was member of the Ethic Committee for Research on Social Science and Humanities of UMinho (2019-2022).