Bilingualism

Shahrzad Mahootian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351250740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bilingualism provides a concise and lively introduction to bilingualism as a social and linguistic phenomenon and explains its impact on individuals and on society. Addressing questions such as what it means to be bilingual, how one becomes bilingual, and how exposure to more than one language affects a child's cognitive development, this book features:

• an introduction to the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cognitive outcomes of bilingualism, including bilingual language acquisition, the grammar of language-mixing, the link between language choice and identity, and the value of maintaining and promoting bilingualism;
• up-to-date overviews of the prominent concerns and facts about bilingualism;
• activities and discussion questions which invite readers to consider their own perspectives on bilingualism and how it manifests in their own lives and communities;
• links to relevant videos and suggested further reading, including topical novels, short stories, and essays.

Aimed at students with no background in linguistics, this book is essential reading for anyone studying bilingualism for the first time.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Do you or does someone you know speak more than one language? Have you ever thought about how one becomes bilingual? Have you wondered why some people can speak more than one language easily and fluently while others struggle in learning and using other languages? In this volume, we consider many aspects of this extraordinarily ordinary human capacity—that of acquiring and using multiple languages. Bilingualism has long been an area of interest and study in a number of fields, from linguistics to psychology to education. It has been defined from many perspectives: social, structural, cognitive, historical, legal, and educational. Many of the definitions and discussions intertwine and overlap, yet each discipline focuses on specific aspects and functions of bilingualism. As a subfield of linguistics, as with all things in linguistics, the focus of bilingualism is to look for patterns in form and function: to look for rule-governed, systematic generalizations that guide the grammatical features of bilingualism as well as the functional aspects of language use by bilinguals. Whether exploring the grammar of utterances produced by mixing two or more languages, or looking at the social functions of choosing one language over another in bilingual speakers’ repertoires, we will see that bilinguals’ language use and choices, like monolinguals’, are complex and rule-driven. Our starting point in the exploration of this topic is to identify what a bilingual is, and how bilingualism comes to be.

Thinking Matters

Before reading further, take a moment to consider how nations, communities, and individuals become bilingual.

Simply, bilingualism is a result of languages in contact—or more precisely, the result of people, cultures, and/or nations in contact. Contact can come in many forms, with migration, war, and colonization as the top contact-producing events historically. Consequently, many countries have come to house multiple languages. For example, there are 67 languages spoken in Iran. Papua New Guinea has the rest of the world beat, housing 841 languages, including 3 official languages, among a population of approximately 7 million. In Papua New Guinea, virtually everyone is conversant in two or more languages.

Political and economic alliances and the often arbitrary assignment of national borders can present opportunities for bilingual communities to develop. Switzerland is the oft-cited example of alliances and borders leading to four languages—Swiss German, French, Italian, and Romansch—having official status. However, other major reasons for the existence of multilingual countries include colonization and immigration (often to escape war, persecution, or economic upheaval). In the United States, for example, linguistic diversity can be mostly attributed to immigration, beginning with Spanish explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries and followed by the British beginning in the 17th century. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, Germans, Celts, Italians, Chinese, and immigrants from Slavic countries found their way to the United States (US). As a consequence of world events in which the United States was either directly or indirectly involved, the mid- and late-20th century into the 2000s saw more immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries seeking refuge or better lives in the United States.¹

Other sources of contact include educational and career opportunities, commerce, and tourism, which can result in the acquisition of languages at an individual level rather than at a community or national level. Consequently, bilingualism can develop during childhood, as part of the cultural transmission of language within a family and/or a bilingual community, or during adulthood. If you are thinking, then, that bilingualism is not a new trend, or a trend at all, you are absolutely correct. In fact, more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, able to use more than one language on a regular basis. That said, we set as the goal of this chapter an overview of decades-long efforts involved in defining bilingualism, and the factors that need to be considered in describing the bilingual individual.

In Chapter 2, we look at bilingualism and multilingualism on a global scale and discover that many nations have been bilingual, officially (de jure) or unofficially (de facto), for millennia. Overall, the story that unfolds is one where bilingualism is not the exception, but for over 50% of the world’s population it is the norm. We also take a closer look at the complex relationships between and across languages in contact situations and examine how the variety of languages available to an individual or speech community is employed as a resource in social interactions and as a means for self-identification and community membership. The flipside of contact between cultures and languages—how contact, in some cases, contributes to linguistic and cultural endangerment—will also be discussed.

Chapter 3 examines borrowing, language mixing, and codeswitching, the most common linguistic by-products of bilingualism. We review the various models that have been proposed to explain how the bilingual’s two grammars interact to produce mixed language utterances (codeswitches), and we explore the social functions of codeswitching and language choice. In Chapter 4, we take a look at how children become bilingual and whether being raised bilingually affects the natural developmental path of language acquisition. Moreover, we examine the implications of language mixing in the speech of young children and the age at which they start to differentiate between their two or more languages. In Chapter 5, we consider the cognitive effects of bilingualism, including theories of how language may be organized in the bilingual brain and how bilingualism may affect intelligence. Chapter 6 summarizes the main points presented in this volume and offers concluding remarks.

1.1 What is Bilingualism and Who is Bilingual?

The practice of using two or more languages has earned a number of titles, and even more definitions. Of course ‘bilingualism’ specifically refers to the ability to use two languages, but most linguists use the terms bilingualism, multilingualism, and more recently, plurilingualism, to capture what more than half the world’s population considers a normal part of their lives and identities. In this volume, we use the three terms more or less interchangeably to refer to the same linguistic phenomenon, that of the coexistence of two or more languages, whether to refer to bilingual individuals or communities or nations. The latter two terms best apply to contexts where there are two or more languages and/or distinct dialects (varieties)² present in a community without the expectation that all members of the community know or use all the languages. Bilingual, on the other hand, can best describe individuals who have the capability of using more than one language or dialect. But what do we mean when we remark that someone is bilingual or claim that we ourselves are? Or that someone is not bilingual? In his article “Multilingualism: Some Central Concepts,” John Edwards (2013, p. 5) asks, “Where does bilingualism ‘start’? And how are we to accommodate different levels of fluency?” We shall see that both questions continue to elicit a variety of answers, leading us to conclude that a one-size-fits-all definition of bilingualism is not the answer.

Thinking Matters

Take a moment to write down a definition starting with “To be bilingual”, and then share your definition with others. Did you agree with one another?

As you may have discovered, everyone has a general idea of what it means to be bilingual, whether they themselves are bilingual or not. As noted previously, at the most elementary level, we think of a bilingual as someone with the ability to use two (or more) languages. But how do we define use? For example, a speaker may be completely fluent in Language A when talking about car engines but quite at a loss when it comes to naming common flowers and trees in Language A. Or the bilingual may be able to read and write in one of his or her two languages, but not in both. Are both or either of these individuals bilingual? Moreover, definitions of individual bilingualism only partially overlap with definitions of bilingualism at a national level, thus requiring other measures and terms of reference to cover and distinguish each. In this section, the focus will be on determining which linguistic variables are relevant to forming a practicable definition of bilingualism.

To get us started, consider the following scenarios and decide whether you would describe the speaker in each to be bilingual. Make note of the reasons for your judgments. Which of the scenarios did the definition you wrote cover?

1. 1. The bank teller who provides service to English-speaking and Spanish-speaking customers in each of their respective languages. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
2. 2. The teacher in a bilingual elementary school classroom who speaks English with a noticeable Urdu accent. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
3. 3. The four-year-old child raised in a Senegalese-French dual language household who occasionally utters sentences using words from both languages. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
4. 4. The annoyed teenager raised in a dual language household who, when spoken to in Greek, will respond only in English. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
5. 5. The college student who has studied Chinese for three years in preparation for an exchange program where all classes will be in Chinese. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
6. 6. The server in a trendy Barcelona tapas bar who regularly speaks in English to English-speaking tourists. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
7. 7. The adult who can converse comfortably on a variety of topics in two languages, but can only read and write in one of the languages. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
8. 8. The international student from Saudi Arabia who is finishing her second year in an MA program in the US with a 3.5 GPA. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?
9. 9. The second-generation Vietnamese-American college freshman who uses Vietnamese and English frequently at home, at school and at his part-time job, but can only read and write in English. Yes___ No____ Maybe__. Why?

Did you find any commonalities across the nine scenarios that swayed you toward a ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’ answer for each? It would not be surprising if you thought this exercise to be less than straightforward, whether you are monolingual or multilingual. The bank teller, the sulky teenager, the college student, the Vietnamese-American freshman, and even the four-year-old, along with all the others, are unequivocally bilinguals. However, for some people, the ability to read and write in both languages, to have native-like command of both languages, and keeping the two languages separate and unmixed, may be nonnegotiable defining features of bilinguals. It’s important to note that, as linguists, we recognize that ‘balanced bilinguals’, speakers with equal abilities in all of their languages, are rare. Or more accurately, that they are an ideal, based on the mistaken notion that a bilingual is simply two monolinguals in one body: someone who has attained the same advanced linguistic and cultural knowledge along with equal academic knowledge and literacy skills in all of their languages. So what does it mean to be bilingual? In the following sections we will try our best to answer this complex ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Societal Bilingualism/Plurilingualism
• 3 Mixing Languages: Structure and Social Functions
• 4 Childhood Bilingualism
• 5 Bilingualism and the Brain
• 6 Summary
• Appendix
• Index