Lingue ereditarie nei Paesi Bassi: Innovazioni morfosintattiche

This contribution focuses on heritage languages in the Netherlands. After discussing few
definitional and terminological issues, it illustrates some of the findings of the ERC project Heritage languages in multilingual Netherlands, relative to the type of contact-induced
change attested in bilingual individuals who speak Dutch as dominant language and one of
the following heritage languages: Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, or Malay. A quantitative and
qualitative investigation on these heritage languages reveals that cross-linguistic influence
from the dominant language most often manifests itself as a redistribution of already available structures. The social factors that seem to play a major role are parental language input
and social network.