Due to labour mobility, which is guaranteed by the Schengen Area, Europeans often decide to move to another EU country in order to find a well-paid job. Germany is one of the top destinations for EU internal migration, and many citizens from both eastern and southern EU member states choose this country to move to. In fact, since 2013, the migration from southern European countries, incl. Greece, has been on the rise (Batsaikhan et al., 2018).

However, people arriving to Germany may face some difficulties, esp. while having little to no prior knowledge of the German language. This puts them in an entirely new linguistic environment, which might make settling in a new country all the more difficult. Since the majority of those migrants are adults, they may find acquiring a new language challenging. As noted by Birdsong (1999), the age of L2 acquisition might have an impact on how successful it is, with older learners seemingly struggling more with acquiring not only the language-specific phonemes, but also grammatical structures (Newport,1990; Dimroth, 2008).

Nevertheless, it is possible for a late learner to successfully acquire L2, given that the circumstances favour language acquisition (Birdsong 1999). Therefore, we were interested in studying the linguistic profiles of a few selected Greek immigrants to Germany in order to see how they adjust linguistically to living in a foreign country and how well they have been able to acquire a local language, i.e. German. This line of inquiry provided us with an example of how EU internal migrants cope with linguistic challenges inherent to immigration.