HI-LING
LINGUISTICS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL
UNIT 2: VIOLATION OF MAXIMS
Lesson 2: individual bilingualism
Definition: A person's ability to produce and/or understand two languages.
Key Concepts
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Complementarity principle
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Bilingual language acquisition
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Person-Language-Bond
UNIT 1: FACETS OF INDIVIDUAL BILINGUALISM
Language acquisition depends heavily on the family and the social and societal environment. There are various possible scenarios for bilingual language acquisition. For example, both parents come from Italy but now live in England. The children then mainly speak Italian at home and learn English at school and with friends. Or one parent comes from Switzerland, the other from India, but both live in the USA. This means that the child grows up speaking three different languages. There are countless other scenarios.
As a result, many bilinguals are not able to speak both languages equally well. For example, a person can explain how a motor works in French, but can only cook with recipes in German. This is known as the complementarity principle. The two languages complement each other, so that a bilingual person can talk about everything, but favours one language for certain topics. This is a logical consequence of the way the language is learnt. The person in the example above may have studied mechanical engineering at a French university and learnt to cook from their German-speaking mother.
As you can see here, the age at which you learn a language also influences your competence. Many people think, the younger you are when you learn the language, the better your proficiency will be. However, this is not always the case and depends on how much exposure you have to the language. If you learn French for a few lessons a week at school, you will probably learn the language slower than if you move to France as an adult and are exposed to the language all the time. Individual bilingualism is therefore not simply equal to individual bilingualism, but depends on various personal factors.
Activity 1: Discussion
In which areas do you use which languages/dialects? Discuss with your neighbour what you usually talk about in the languages and dialects you speak. Are there things that you can't communicate in one language but can communicate better in another? Think about areas such as school and home, but also about activities or feelings.
There are no right or wrong solutions to this exercise, as every experience is individual.
UNIT 2: BILINGUAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Monolingual and bilingual children acquire language at roughly similar rates, which means that the most important milestones are reached at similar times as long as the bilingual children are regularly exposed to both languages. However, children do not necessarily learn the same structures in both languages at exactly the same time. Some languages have a simpler grammar than others, which is why certain parts are learnt more quickly. Children who learn English and German at the same time will probably master the English article system, which largely consists of the word the, more quickly than the German system with its three seemingly randomly assigned genera (masculine, feminine and neuter) and four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive).
However, it has long been unclear whether bilingual children learn the two languages separately or as a single system. Those in favour of the theory that children learn the languages as a joint system argue that young children often mix the languages. For example, they say bitte-please or combine chaud and hot to form shot. It has also been found that there is hardly any overlap in the vocabulary of the two languages at the beginning of language acquisition. Children therefore only know either the word Katze or cat, but not both, as even in monolingual acquisition only one word per concept is learnt before synonyms are added. Young children therefore first see the words of the different languages as synonyms and not as words of different languages.
But many more researchers believe that children do not mix the two language systems. Children learn early on which grammatical rules belong to which languages and do not, for example, attach Italian endings to English words. If they do mix the languages, it is usually code-switching (see lesson 4) rather than an actual mixing of the two language systems. Children are able to distinguish at an early age with whom they should speak which language. In one study, a 15-month-old girl spoke exclusively Spanish with her nanny and English with her mother. This is called the person-language bond. Children therefore assign one (or more) language(s) quite strictly to every person they know. If this bond is broken (e.g. if the Italian mother suddenly speaks Swedish), this can confuse or infuriate the child. This person-language bond makes it less stressful for the brain to speak, as the choice of words and grammatical structures is smaller.
Bilingualism also influences parts of the brain that have nothing to do with language. For example, bilinguals are generally better at suppressing unwanted stimuli because they are used to doing so: when they speak in one language, they have to suppress the words of the other language.
There are many myths surrounding bilingualism. How many of them do you know or believe? Test your knowledge with this quiz.
Activity 2: Quiz
Final thought for this lesson
Many people use two or more languages on a daily basis and thus achieve high cognitive performance.