The Faroese language is relatively unexplored territory regarding psychological aspects such as how children acquire the language and language impairments. This inspired the interest for the subject and led to this master thesis with the research question: How do bilingual Faroese-Danish speaking children do respectively in their L1 and L2?
This master thesis examines the language abilities of 15 Faroese-Danish children. Their language has been studied by using various existing language tests. Furthermore, due to lack of material, some tests had to be translated to Faroese. Six language tests are used: TROG-2, Nonsenseword, Sentence repetition, VIBORG and two narratives. All tests have been applied in both Faroese and Danish, which mean that each child has been tested twice. The data showed several interesting results. In general the children do better in the Danish language than the Faroese – this was expected. The TROG-2 results -which measures children's grammatical sentence comprehension – demonstrates an age development. The results for VIBORG vocabulary test also demonstrate an age development, while the Danish results are higher than the Faroese. Like most of the tests, the results for Sentence Repetition also showed better scores in the Danish test. The children showed various issues in relation to the narratives. There was a general trend for all children to have some difficulty with the elements: structural complexity and inner state terms. This may be due to the children´s age and the fact that they developmentally not yet have reached the stage where they are able to give the story characters feelings. Furthermore several of the results for the narratives are higher on
the Faroese stories than the Danish. In the Nonsenseword test the children perform better in Faroese compared to Danish. The results suggest that the children have acquired an appropriate language to address the challenges they faced in their daily lives, while they overall get better results in the Danish tests. Furthermore a case study was made with two children, which had language profiles
that differentiated substantially from the other children and could suggest some level of language impairments.
Finally it is concluded that all results identified in this study require further research, as well as there is need for more research in Faroese children's language development. This conclusion is based on the fact that it is necessary to know more about Faroese-Danish children’s language development.