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This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migrants found work in Germany as so-called ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Because the aim of many Portuguese migrant families was to return to Portugal, their children met relatively good conditions for the acquisition of their heritage language. Nonetheless, second-generation heritage speakers (HSs) show some linguistic particularities in comparison to monolingual Portuguese speakers in Portugal. Based on the results of previous research, we show that the following factors shape the linguistic knowledge of this group of bilinguals: (1) Restricted exposure to the heritage language may cause a delay in the development of certain linguistic structures, (2) deviations from the standard norm may be related to the lack of formal education and the primacy of the colloquial register and (3) heritage bilinguals may accelerate ongoing diachronic development. We argue that apparent effects of influence from the environmental language can often have alternative explanations.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
This paper investigates the interpretation of overt and null subject pronouns in the heritage language (European Portuguese, EP) of Portuguese heritage bilinguals (children and teenagers) in Germany and Andorra with German (Ger) and Spanish/Catalan (Span/Cat) as environmental languages and compares it to the outcomes of age-matched monolingual Portuguese children and monolingual adults. The results of an offline sentence interpretation task show that all groups of speakers differentiate between overt and null subjects. They are also sensitive to the syntactic context (intrasentential vs. intersentential) and the directionality of the anaphoric relation (anaphoric vs. cataphoric), although to different degrees. We argue that the interpretation of differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers needs to take into account these different syntactic contexts of pronominal resolution in order to gain a better understanding of the role of language-internal factors and cross-linguistic influence (CLI). With respect to the latter, the comparison between the Ger-EP and the Span/Cat-EP groups reveals no differences between these populations and shows that for the speakers’ knowledge of anaphora resolution in EP it is not decisive whether the contact language is a null subject language or not (confirming thus the results in Sorace et al. 2009).