ERC Synergy NavAR

The project “Navigating the Pathways of Nativeness: Attrition and Reinforcement of Childhood Languages in Contexts of Return Migration” (NAVAR) investigates how the languages that bilingual speakers acquire in childhood change when their linguistic environment changes. The project focuses on German/Portuguese and German/Polish bilinguals who grew up in Germany. In early childhood, they acquired Polish or Portuguese as a heritage language and German as the environmental language. Later in life, they move to Poland or Portugal. There, the heritage language becomes the dominant environmental language, and German is often spoken only rarely.

The project asks how the two childhood languages develop under these new linguistic conditions. Do speakers’ knowledge of Portuguese and Polish keep developing through increased use? Which areas of German are most affected by language attrition, and which remain more stable? Does a linguistic structure survive better if it is also present in the contact language? Which cognitive factors counteract language attrition? Which role do biographical factors and diverse migration experiences play?

NAVAR addresses these and other questions through large-scale data collection across the 3 countries: Germany, Poland and Portugal. Alongside linguistic experiments, this includes building a pioneering open-source language corpus.

Understanding how native languages are shaped by changing linguistic environments sheds light on language as part of human cognition. It also contributes to theoretical linguistics, language acquisition research, corpus linguistics, migration studies and psycholinguistics.

The findings can also offer important input for education systems and migration policy. They can help preserve childhood languages and so strengthen linguistic diversity.