ON THE USE OF THE CAPITAL LETTER BY PORTUGUESE HERITAGE LANGAUGE STUDENTS IN SWITZERLAND

Abstract

This article focuses on a case study developed in 2017 with a sample of portuguese Heritage Language students, living in Zürich (Switzerland), and intends to be a reflection on the deviations in the graphic representation of the capital letter by some bilingual Portuguese descent students. Starting from the empirical hypothesis that the cause of these deviations consists in the transfer from German to Portuguese, the intervention procedure implemented in the group of informants under study was based on a sequence of two exercises at different evaluative moments, allowing, in this way, to collect and analyze data, in order to assess the class and subclass of words that register the highest percentage of deviant occurrences and to understand if the metalinguistic reflection contributes (or not) to the use of capital letters in accordance with the European Portuguese orthographic standard.

Keywords

• Portuguese Heritage Language
• Orthographic norm
• Transfer
• Spelling deviations in the use of capital letters