Full Professor · German Linguistics

Cristina Flores

Dean (President) of the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Minho. Researches bilingual language development, heritage language acquisition and language attrition in contexts of migration and return.

About

I am a Full Professor at the Department of German and Slavic Studies of the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal) and, since November 2025, Dean (President) of the School of Arts and Humanities (ELACH). I am an integrated researcher at the Centre for Humanistic Studies (CEHUM), where I am a member of the Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics research group (LTE).

I hold a degree in Teaching Portuguese and German (1999), a Master’s degree in Portuguese-German Studies (2004) and a PhD in Language Sciences – German Linguistics (2008), the field in which I also obtained my Habilitation (Agregação) in 2022, all from the University of Minho.

My research focuses on bilingual language development across the lifespan, in particular heritage language acquisition, language attrition and the reactivation of childhood languages in speakers who have returned to their country of origin, and language contact, with a special focus on European Portuguese and German. I am one of the three Principal Investigators of the ERC Synergy Grant NavAR – Navigating the Pathways of Nativeness. Attrition and Reinforcement of Childhood Languages in the Context of Return Migration (starting May 2027), together with Esther Rinke and Aldona Sopata.