Portuguese as a heritage language in Finland - The impact of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors on the acquisition of articles

Understanding how sociolinguistic factors affect language acquisition and development is essential to promote the maintenance of minority mother tongues, nowadays denominated Heritage Languages (HLs). In the present study, linguistic and sociolinguistic data collected through an online experiment connecting questionnaires and a written image -based task was compared with the pupils' performance using articles whenever the context required it, i.e., to refer to specific referents appearing in the images used as stimuli. My focus is on certain linguistic and sociolinguistic factors such as age, the variety of the heritage language, the language most spoken at home, and the use of HL to access media. I examine how these factors impact the acquisition of articles in Portuguese as a HL in contact with Finnish, which is a language that does not use articles. The participants of the study were 20 Portuguese -speaking children aged from 7 to 14 years. 10 participants were heritage speakers of European Portuguese, and 10 were heritage speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Both groups were attending Portuguese classes offered weekly by municipal schools or educational institutes. The written task was conceived to elicit Portuguese Noun Phrases (NPs) with articles. In this task, the participants needed to write two short stories about sequences of images. Among other remarks, this study found that speaking the HL consistently at home seems to be the most influential variable accounting for article acquisition, promoting target -like use of articles in Noun Phrases with specific readings.