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Okay, so my name is Christina Flores, I am 46 years old, and I am a professor at the Universidad do Minho in Portugal at the Department of German Studies

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I grew up in Germany. My parents moved to Germany as guest workers in the 70s, I grew up in Hamburg and I have a younger sister.

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I grew up bilingually. What does that mean? My parents always spoke Portuguese at home. My mother never really learned German, so Portuguese was our family language.

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Of course, I talked in German to my sister and at school and with friends, including Portuguese friends. That means, Portuguese always - no - German was my dominant language, or my preferred language.

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So, I spoke Portuguese at home, but I also attended Portuguese classes. We called  it 'the Portuguese school’ and it took place twice a week in the afternoon, and it was "voluntary"

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My parent insisted on me going and in the Portuguese classes we learned to write, to read, also Portuguese history, geography and so on. Of course, I didn’t like to go there as a child.

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My friends, for example my Turkish friends, my Greek friends, they were allowed to play in the yard, and we had to go to the 'Portuguese school'. And as such, of course, I didn’t like to go there as a child.

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But today I am grateful to my parents for sending me there, because I can – whatever perfect means – I can read and write perfectly in German and Portuguese. 

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Anyway, these classes have affected my life, my future, because I had a Portuguese teacher from seventh grade on. She was in love with Portuguese literature and that love sort of transferred to her students.

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This means that we read a lot, even classics, so I read all Portuguese classics until my Abitur [school leaving exam]. These lessons continued in the afternoon, until I left school. 

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And yes, and thus a love for Portuguese and Portuguese literature developed. But when I finished my Abitur [school leaving exam], I wanted to study mathematics.

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I was very good at mathematics, so I had excellent grades in maths, I even got a price for the best Abitur [school leaving exam] in mathematics and indeed enrolled in mathematics at the University of Hamburg,

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but at the same time I had this dream of studying Portuguese literature. And that developed through this heritage language class.

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So I have lived in Portugal since 1994. I went there on my own, while my parents and my sister, they stayed in Germany.

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I enrolled in a bachelor’s course for Portuguese and German in teacher training. 

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And in this course I studied Portuguese literature but after the first semester I immediately noticed that I like to read Portuguese literature, but I didn't like studying it. 

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And that is where I discovered linguistics and and I indeed stayed in Portugal, even though it was not planned.

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I did get a position, first as a student assistant in a project and then I was offered another position, then as a lecturer and so on and so I stayed at the University. 

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Yes, and I’m bilingual. But I have lived in Portugal for a long time and I think that the Portuguese language is stronger now. And I often can’t think of German words.

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And I didn’t take part in the development of the German youth language [since the 1990s]. There are some expressions that I still use in German and my German friends laugh because you don’t say that any longer.

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But yes, this is to show how important it is to speak the family language. The teaching of heritage languages, how important this can be. And how important, how much it can influence the future of a child.