Catalan as a Heritage Language in Germany

Abstract

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.