As has been documented for several immigrant languages, one would expect that over time North American Finnish would reduce its inflectional system in favor of prepositions and analytic constructions. Nominal morphology is particularly vulnerable in heritage languages with robust morphology. As heritage speakers tend to become fluent in the majority language while never achieving native fluency in the heritage language, second and third generation speakers who learn the minority language from the first generation may not acquire the full inflectional system of the language spoken in the country of origin. The majority language may also influence the syntax and other features of the heritage language. Thus, North American Finnish differed not only in the lexical items used, but in aspects of morphology and syntax as well.