Finland has a long tradition of bilingual instruction. Nowadays it is even developing, because of globalization and immigration, with an increasing number of bilingual schools, bilingual kinder-gardens andor courses of language maintenance of the language.

This article is part of my research thesis “Spanish-Finnish: language contact in two types of bilingual instruction”. The study is based on a longitudinal investigation of two groups of bilingual children: those attending a bilingual school and those attending language maintenance courses. Both groups were the same age at the moment of data collection (8-10 and 10-12 respectively).

The present topic, nonce borrowing, has been analyzed through the lens of the theory formulated by Poplack et al. (1988, 1989, 1995, 1998, 2012), and it has been distinguished from code-switching and from widespread borrowing. There also exists a theoretical approach vis-à-vis these phenomena, code-switching and nonce borrowing in bilingual children.

The analysis of my data shows the wide scale of nonce borrowing in bilingual children, more specifically, in the context of formal instruction. The analysis is based on frequency (total number of words written and number per informant), types (simple word vs. compound word/ and grammatical types: nouns, verbs, adjectives…), distribution per sentence and morphological integration.

As for the discussion of the results, emphasis is placed on the evolution of the results and the pattern used by bilingual children.