In this article, we employ aspects of Processability Theory (PT) to study the language of one fourth generation heritage speaker of Norwegian in America. This man, who we refer to as Lars, was almost 50 years old when we first met and recorded him in 2010, and to our knowledge he is among the youngest Norwegian-Americans still able to speak Norwegian as a heritage language in the Upper Midwest. His dominant language was Norwegian until he started school, when English took over this role. When we met him the first time, he had not spoken Norwegian to any substantial extent for several decades. When we examine his language, we find a number of grammatical deviations from the baseline – the language as spoken in the old world, and we discuss the possible explanations for these; are they related to the quality of the input, are they due to attrition or are they the result of incomplete acquisition? In the discussion, we include certain aspects of PT, and based on this, we claim that attrition is the most likely explanation for the reduced structures in Lars’ Norwegian.

The main objective of this paper is to examine certain trends and tendencies in the acquisition of nominal morphology in the spontaneous speech of three L1 Kurdish-speaking children acquiring Norwegian as an L2. This paper reports on variations in the children’s use of articles and suffixes at three different points along their paths of acquisition, from approximately 2:7 (age:months) to 8:8 years after the age of onset of acquisition (AoOA). The findings suggest that constructions paralleling those of adult L1 speakers are the main pattern in L2 production of the children in the present study. In addition, article omission in modified noun phrases (NPs), gender-agreement discrepancy, omission of the definite suffix in simple nominal phrases and omission of the indefinite article are other tendencies.