Germany is currently the third country with more Catalan residents mainly characterized as families with children born in Germany but raised with Catalan as heritage language (HL). Only few studies have investigated Catalan as an HL in Germany. Our study tries to fill this gap with spontaneous recordings of 16 bilingual and trilingual children (mean age 5;7). In terms of language competence (measured via MLU), balanced bilingualism is present in most children (44%), followed by those showing a dominance into German (38%). Interestingly, regarding language use (measured in w/minute), both balanced and Catalan dominants were fluent in both L1s similarly, while the German dominant group mostly prefer German. Moreover, the parents filled in a questionnaire on current and cumulative input from which some factors were examined such as family language policies (FLP), child’s language choice to the Catalan-speaking parent, Catalan skills of the non-native parent, family language and frequency of comprehension and production activities. In a nutshell, the results show that FLP and HL as FL or no FL seem to have an impact in the child’s grammatical development in the very early years, as opposed to family language. Children mostly direct their speech in the HL when talking to the Catalan-speaking parent.
In heritage language acquisition studies, it has been observed that heritage speakers may experience a shift of language dominance from the heritage language to the majority language due to input quantity and quality factors. The appearance of code-switching in the productions of multilingual speakers has been well attested and has been mostly linked to age and language dominance as well as family language policies and consistence of input, among other factors. For the appearance of code-switching, our cross-sectional study analyses language dominance (MLU) and fluency (w/minute) along with child-external factors, such as family language policies, family language and siblings’ interaction, in sixteen multilingual children (mean age 5;7) being raised in Germany with German and Catalan (and another L1) simultaneously. In a nutshell, children who are dominant in the majority language ultimately code-switch more frequently than the other groups. Interestingly, balanced and heritage-language-dominant children present instances of intrasentential code-switching (particularly insertions and alternations), while intersentential code-switching is frequent across all groups. When families have chosen the ‘one person-one language’ strategy and do not have a family language, code-switching is almost absent. Finally, sibling groups using both the heritage and the majority languages in their interactions show low code-switching rates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.