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UMinho researcher’s team wins European project with €8.8 million grant for linguistics research

Fotos

Cristina Flores - Escola de Letras, Artes e Ciências Humanas da UMinho (foto: DR)

Aldona Sopata - Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland (foto: DR)

Esther Rinke - Esther Rinke of Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany (foto: DR)

Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke & Cristina Flores (foto: DR)

Cristina Flores com Montserrat Comesaña e Idalete Dias, da UMinho (foto: Nuno Gonçalves)

Thursday, 11/12/2026

The project will study the impact of migration on childhood languages

Cristina Flores, full professor at the School of Arts and Humanities (ELACH) and researcher at the Centre for Humanistic Studies (CEHUM) of the University of Minho, is one of the three principal investigators of an international team that has just won a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant 2026 for the project NAVAR – Navigating the Pathways of Nativeness: Attrition and Reinforcement of Childhood Languages in Contexts of Return Migration. The funding amounts to €8.8 million over 72 months. It will support a large-scale research programme that will place Portugal, alongside Germany and Poland, at the forefront of research on bilingualism, migration and linguistic diversity.

The international team, led by Esther Rinke of Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany), Aldona Sopata of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland) and Cristina Flores of the University of Minho (Portugal), aims to deepen our understanding of how migration, and return migration in particular, shapes languages acquired in childhood, contributing to a better understanding of language development across the lifespan. Cristina Flores explains that the work “will focus on bilingual communities of Portuguese and Polish origin who grew up in Germany, using both German and the heritage language (Polish or Portuguese), but who later returned to their families’ countries of origin”. In this new setting, the heritage language becomes dominant in everyday life, while German tends to be used only occasionally. The researchers will seek to understand “how this change in linguistic context affects the childhood languages, which biographical and cognitive factors predict the processes of language attrition and reinforcement, and whether similar patterns can be observed across different bilingual communities”, she adds.

The research will use (psycho)linguistic and cognitive tasks and interviews about migration histories, and will also create an annotated open-source corpus of bilingual speech for studying how native languages evolve over the life course. The results are expected to generate new knowledge about bilingualism, language development and human cognition, areas considered essential to understanding societies increasingly shaped by mobility. The data will inform public policy on migration, contribute to multilingual education strategies and strengthen initiatives promoting linguistic diversity. The study’s social relevance is all the greater in a European context where millions of citizens experience transnational mobility and constant contact between different languages and cultures.

ERC Grants

ERC (European Research Council) grants are considered the most competitive and prestigious in the EU, supporting frontier research. They include Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, Synergy and Proof of Concept Grants. Cristina Flores’s award is a Synergy Grant, the first of its kind for the University of Minho and for its Humanities area. The ERC notes that NAVAR brings together three internationally renowned experts in bilingualism and language development. The project is one of 48 proposals selected for funding in this call, out of 938 applications evaluated, a success rate of 5.1%. At the University of Minho, the Portuguese researcher will also collaborate with Idalete Dias (ELACH) and Montserrat Comesaña (School of Psychology). This is the University of Minho’s 16th ERC grant since 2012, covering fields such as biomaterials, sociology, biotechnology, civil engineering, medicine and the humanities, with a combined value of more than €26.5 million.

Cristina Flores

Born in Póvoa de Varzim to Portuguese parents, Cristina Flores grew up in Hamburg, Germany. Today she is one of Portugal’s most renowned linguists and an international reference in research on bilingualism, language attrition and heritage languages. She is Full Professor of German Linguistics in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Minho, where she has also been President of the School of Arts and Humanities since November 2025. Internationally recognised, she has led and taken part in national and international research projects funded by FCT, DAAD, DFG, the British Academy and the "la Caixa" Foundation, among others, and her scientific output includes more than 90 publications in high-impact international journals and with leading publishers. Over her career she has held several important academic positions. She was President of the Portuguese Linguistics Association.

* Video: YouTube

+Info: ERC, RUM

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UMinho researcher’s team wins European project with €8.8 million grant for linguistics research

Thursday, 11/12/2026

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