The development of pragmatic competence in a year abroad setting, an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics, and indeed also in year abroad research, is taken up in the longitudinal investigation reported on in this paper. In particular, the study concerns the pragmatic competence, operationalised as the development of pragmatic routines, of a group of thirty-three Irish foreign language learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period spent in the target speech community, Germany. The elicitation instrument employed was a production questionnaire, and native speaker data were also collected. Findings point to the favourable but also imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. It is found that learners' use of pragmatic routines increases over time and in addition, that learner-specific routines on the level of form disappear over time. Nevertheless, some remaining tendencies towards ad-hoc-formulations remain, and, where input is not explicit in the second language context, some increases in the use of routines characterised by negative transfer on the level of function and use result.