Portuguese as a heritage language in contact with Finnish – Impact of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors on the acquisition of articles

Authors

• Patricia Carvalho Ribeiro University of Helsinki

DOI: https://doi.org/10.51814/nm.132057

Keywords:

Heritage Language, Language acquisition, Portuguese in contact with Finnish

Abstract

Despite Finland being one of the few countries financing the teaching of minority mother tongues at school, the study of heritage languages in the Finnish context is still incipient. 

The present paper is part of a PhD dissertation focusing on the use of articles in narratives written by children aged from 7 to 14 years old, speaking either European Portuguese (EP)  or Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as a Heritage Language (HL), and attending classes of Portuguese offered weekly by municipal schools or educational institutes.

In this article, I focus on part of my data (from 20 participants) collected in Finland and concerning certain linguistic and sociolinguistic factors - namely age, the variety of the HL, the most spoken language at home, and the HL use to access media - possibly impacting the acquisition of articles in Portuguese in a context where this heritage language is developing in contact with Finnish – an article-less language.

The preliminary results suggest that HL speakers having access to formal classes of the language can use articles properly when writing a narrative, no matter the variety of the HL spoken (BP or EP). Among the other variables investigated, speaking the HL the most at home ( i.e.,  plenty of HL input from home) seems to be the most influential on article acquisition in this study. Conversely, speaking mostly the environmental language at home seems to have a negative influence on article acquisition.