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Bilingual
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Bilingual
life and reality
François Grosjean
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
all r ights r eserv ed
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To Henri Jean-Baptiste, Caroline, Faith, Jill, and Brigitte,
as well as to Lysiane, Marc, and Eric, who, among many others,
became bilingual unintentionally and live(d) their lives
with two or more languages
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
p a rt 1 . biling u a l a d u lt s
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c o n t e n t s
p a rt 2 . bilin g u a l c h ild r e n
Conclusion 243
Notes 247
Index 271
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Acknowledgments
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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
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Introduction
Radio, to the hostages who had not been freed along with her. I
also listened to Roger Federer in London, talking about the final he
had played at Wimbledon; he was tired, having finished his game
against Rafael Nadal quite late in the evening and then given inter-
views in his four different languages (Swiss German, German,
French, and English). Now, as I am settling down at my desk, ac-
companied by the music of George Frideric Handel, a German-
Italian-English trilingual, I can hear the children in the day-care
xiii
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
center across the street singing songs in French and Italian. Bilin-
gualism is indeed present in practically every country in the world,
in all classes of society, in all age groups. It has been estimated that
half of the world’s population, if not more, is bilingual. This book
is about them.
Why a new book after so many others on the same topic? The
reason goes back a long way. When I was a young student at the
University of Paris coming to terms with my own bilingualism and
biculturalism, I looked for a book on the subject and found only
scholarly works that were rather long and difficult to read (I wasn’t
a linguist then). In addition, I didn’t feel that they addressed the
very down-to-earth issues I was interested in at that moment, nor
did they answer some of my basic questions: What is bilingualism?
Was I really a bilingual? Why was I suddenly having difficulties with
language when things had gone smoothly until that point? (I had
just returned to France after a ten-year absence.) Was I English, as
my education had made me, or French, as my name and my pass-
port indicated? Was it all right to be bicultural? These were some of
the questions I was seeking answers to, and looking back over the
years, I now know that many bilinguals have asked themselves the
same questions. It took me quite some time, and my own delving
into bilingualism, first at the level of my master’s thesis and then as
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
xv
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
come to terms with their own reality and accept who they are—
competent but different types of users of languages.
I want this book to be optimistic but also realistic. Bilingualism
is not the burden or the problem it has been made out to be by
some, but neither is it the complete bliss that others would have us
believe. Bilingualism is quite simply a fact of life for millions and
millions of people, with its ups and downs, its good times and its
bad times, its moments of joy (there are many) and its moments of
frustration (there are some). As a bilingual and bicultural person
myself, I will try to describe people who, like me, know and use sev-
eral languages and interact with different cultures; I will try do so
in as clear and informative a way as possible.
This book has two parts: the first concerns bilingual adults and
the second bilingual children. Each part is broken down into short
chapters that discuss various aspects of the bilingual person. In
Part 1, I examine the reasons why people are bilingual and show the
extent of bilingualism. I then describe bilinguals in terms of lan-
guage fluency and use, and look at the different functions of the bi-
lingual’s languages. I spend three chapters on how bilinguals adapt
their language production to the situation and to those they are in-
teracting with—other bilinguals or monolinguals—and I cover such
bilingual behaviors as code-switching, borrowing, and interference.
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
time span, and why some older references? The answer is simple.
The study of bilingualism now has a long history, and it is impor-
tant to mention the classic works of some of the early research-
ers in the field, such as Einar Haugen, Uriel Weinreich, William
Mackey, Wallace Lambert, and others. They set the stage for schol-
ars of my generation, and for the ones following mine. That said, I
do not actually cite many references in this text, as I do not want to
weigh down the chapters with notes. Readers who want to delve
further into particular aspects of bilingualism may refer to my pre-
vious works, as well as to the many other introductory and more
advanced books on the subject.
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I
Bilingual Adults
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1
Why Are People Bilingual?
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Bilinguals are those who use two or more languages (or dialects) in
their everyday lives.
ing the notion of bilingualism to those who use two or more lan-
guages on a regular basis.
Before spending several chapters examining the bilingual person,
we need to ask ourselves why people are bilingual and why it is that
so many inhabitants of the world use two or more languages in
their everyday life. In this chapter we will look first at the factors
that lead to bilingualism, and second at how extensive bilingualism
really is.
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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why are people bilingual?
among the many that are spoken. In the case of Belgium, for exam-
ple, some contact occurs between the indigenous language groups
and each group learns the language of the others in school, but
many people lead their lives in basically one language. In contrast,
when a country has just one national language (recognized or not),
or an accepted lingua franca, as in many African nations, then
members of most language groups have to become bilingual (exam-
ples would be the Inuit in Canada, the Navajo in the United States,
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Movement of Peoples
bic during the Arab settlement of Egypt). In some cases, but rarely,
each group learns the language of the other (as when Spanish set-
tlers in Paraguay learned Guaraní and Guaraní Indians learned
Spanish).
People have always moved within and across countries and conti-
nents and have done so for many different reasons. Trade, com-
merce, and business have long given rise to language contact and
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why are people bilingual?
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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why are people bilingual?
Education and culture have always been and will always be domains
in which outside languages are learned and used. As far back as the
time of the Roman Empire, almost all educated Romans learned
Greek, which was the language of medicine, rhetoric, philosophy,
and so on. Later in Europe, Italian and then French took on the
same role, as did German for scientific domains in the nineteenth
century. Today, English has taken over as the main lingua franca of
education and culture. In addition, millions of children and stu-
dents, in many different countries, not only learn one or two lan-
guages as subjects in school but are also educated in a language
that is not their native language. This is the case, for example, in
numerous African and Asian nations as well as in most immigra-
tion countries. A Marathi-Hindi-English trilingual writes:
11
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Other Factors
Second is the simple fact that certain jobs require the knowledge
and use of several languages. We have already mentioned trade,
commerce, and various financial businesses. Many other profes-
sions need people to know two or more languages as well: tourism
and travel, the hotel and restaurant industry, diplomacy, research,
12
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why are people bilingual?
This false impression probably comes from the fact that one
rarely has an overall view of the amount of language contact that
occurs in the world. It may also be that some people have very re-
stricted definitions of what it means to be bilingual (we will come
back to this in the next chapter). What is certain is that bilingual-
ism is present in practically every country of the world, in all classes
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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why are people bilingual?
French, an 8.1 percent increase over the number five years earlier.
They represent almost 18 percent of the population. As would be ex-
pected, almost half of the Francophones are bilingual, as opposed
to only 9 percent of the Anglophones. In addition, another 18 per-
cent of the population reports having some mother tongue other
than English and French; since most of those individuals probably
also use one of the two national languages, the bilingual popula-
tion of Canada is therefore probably around 35 percent, a percent-
age somewhat lower than Europe’s.10
What is the situation in the United States? More than thirty years
ago, in Life with Two Languages, I analyzed the 1976 Survey of Income
and Education. It had asked language questions of those who re-
ported a non-English background in the household. I worked out
then that a bit fewer than 13 million inhabitants (some 6 percent of
the population) reported speaking both English and a minority
language on a regular basis—that is, they were bilingual. I con-
cluded that the United States was a heavily monolingual country
when compared with other countries of the world.11 Since then, the
U.S. censuses have asked which language is spoken at home other
than English and how well the person speaks English. Close to 18
percent of the population in the 2000 census reported speaking an-
other language at home, up from 14 percent in 1990 and 11 percent
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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why are people bilingual?
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2
Describing Bilinguals
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describing bilinguals
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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describing bilinguals
whom I had the honor of knowing—did not believe this was truly
possible. He wrote:
21
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
articles in a second language but who rarely speaks it, the foreign-
born spouse who interacts with friends in his first language, the
member of a linguistic minority who uses the minority language
only at home and the majority language in all other domains of
life, the Deaf person who uses sign language with her friends but a
spoken language (often in its written form) with a hearing person,
and so on. Despite the great diversity among these people, they all
share a common feature: they lead their lives with two or more lan-
guages.
22
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describing bilinguals
Daily Lb La
Language
use
Lc
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Never Ld
Low High
Language fluency
Figure 2.1. Describing the bilingual in terms of language use and lan-
guage fluency. The languages in this example are English (La), Spanish
(Lb), Italian (Lc), and French (Ld).
23
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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describing bilinguals
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
chapter.
Another important factor that characterizes bilinguals concerns
the functions of their languages: which languages (and language
skills) they use, in what context, for what purpose, and to what ex-
tent. We know, for example, that with many bilinguals only one lan-
guage is used for certain specific domains (such as at work, for reli-
gious practices) whereas others may cross domains (as when several
languages are used with friends). In the next chapter we will exam-
26
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describing bilinguals
guals interact with two or more cultures or whether they live their
lives within one culture. Not all bilinguals are also bicultural. For
example, a Moroccan who knows and uses Moroccan Arabic as well
as Modern Standard Arabic and who has lived all his life in Mo-
rocco is bilingual but not bicultural. Nevertheless many bilinguals,
such as first-generation immigrants, are also bicultural, and this
plays a role in their bilingualism. We will discuss this in Chapter 10,
“Bilinguals Who Are Also Bicultural.”
27
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3
The Functions of Languages
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the functions of languages
Bilinguals usually acquire and use their languages for different pur-
poses, in different domains of life, with different people. Different as-
pects of life often require different languages.
very much and does not know very well, shares just one domain
with La and Lb (distant friend).2
For all bilinguals we can draw the same kind of language-use
pattern covering domains such as parents, children, siblings, dis-
tant relatives, work, sports, religion, school, shopping, friends, go-
ing out, hobbies, and so on, and come up with a distribution of
their languages. Some languages will cover many domains, others
fewer, and some will cover domains along with another language
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
La La
La
Lb La
La
La
Lb & Lb
La
& Lb
La
La
& Lb
& Lb
& Lc
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the functions of languages
even sometimes the discursive and pragmatic rules needed for that
domain. Let me give a personal example. When I was on the faculty
of Northeastern University in Boston in the 1970s and ’80s, I taught
introductory statistics, among other courses. I therefore knew the
“language of statistics,” but I knew it only in English. When I came
back to Europe and offered to teach a statistics course in French, I
suddenly found myself in difficulty. I simply didn’t have the vocab-
ulary in French and didn’t know how to say such things as “stan-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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the functions of languages
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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the functions of languages
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
How often have we been asked as bilinguals, “Oh, since you’re bilin-
gual in X and Y, could you translate this for me?” And how often
have we felt inadequate in proposing a translation? Of course we
try to please our interlocutor (until the requests become too fre-
quent or difficult), but we often have to explain why we couldn’t do
a very good job—because we didn’t know several translation equiva-
lents, for example, or didn’t understand part of a domain-specific
text. The response we get is invariably, “Oh, but I thought you were
bilingual!”
Bilinguals’ lack of translation skills can be explained by means
of the complementarity principle. Unless bilinguals have domains
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covered with two languages, or they acquired the language they are
translating into (the target language) in a manner that puts the em-
phasis on translation equivalents and thus on building a bridge be-
tween La and Lb, they may find themselves without the resources to
produce a good translation. In given domains, they may be missing
the required vocabulary and set expressions. This is exactly what
happened to me when I had to translate statistical terms from En-
glish into French; I just didn’t have them. In addition, bilinguals
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the functions of languages
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
was to describe an event from their own life that the prompt word
brought to mind. The researchers also asked the participants, after
the interview, to indicate the language in which they had been spo-
ken to, they had spoken, or they had been surrounded by at the
time that each recalled event took place. If the event prompted by
the word “cat” took place in Russian, the researchers called this a
Russian memory; if in English, then it was an English memory.
They found that their bilingual subjects accessed more Russian
memories when interviewed in Russian than when interviewed in
English, and more English memories when interviewed in English
than when interviewed in Russian. Marian and Neisser concluded
that bilinguals are more likely to retrieve events (memories) that
occurred in a particular language if that same language is also used
in the retrieval setting. They called this language-dependent recall.
Thus the complementarity principle also manifests itself in the re-
call of events that took place in the bilingual’s different languages—
which, as we have seen, are usually linked to different domains.
The complementarity principle is certainly one of the most per-
vasive aspects of individual bilingualism. Bilinguals who speak two
or more languages feel its constant presence in their everyday lives.
They may even comment openly on its different manifestations,
without finding the exact words to account for them.
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4
Language Mode and
Language Choice
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
La
Lb
La
No Yes
La La
Lb Lb
Monolingual Bilingual
language language
mode mode
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Figure 4.1. Deciding which language to use and whether to bring in the
other language.
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language mode and language choice
Language Mode
Looking at Figure 4.1 again, we see that the monolingual language
mode and the bilingual language mode are endpoints on a contin-
uum (an arrow line links them). In their everyday lives, bilinguals
find themselves at various points along this continuum that induce
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
such as close friends or siblings, and with whom they feel they can
bring in the other language. They might also be in bilingual lan-
guage mode when they are listening to a conversation between
other bilinguals in which the two languages are used. Bilinguals
can also be in an intermediary mode on the continuum, for exam-
ple when their interlocutor is bilingual but does not like to bring in
the other language during a conversation, or when they are talking
about a subject in the “wrong” language (their other language is
probably activated in such a situation, even if they do not use it).
Bilinguals differ from one another in terms of how much they
move along the language-mode continuum. Some stay at the mono-
lingual end, whereas others will move right along the continuum,
choosing different points on it depending on the situation, the per-
son they are speaking with, the topic, and so on. Those who live
in bilingual communities may find themselves at the bilingual end
of the continuum during the major part of their day. Movement
along the continuum can occur at any time, as soon as there is a
need for it. We might start at the monolingual end and then, half-
way through a conversation, realize that the person we are talking
to is also bilingual and move to the bilingual end. We might also
start at the bilingual end and then come to understand, as the
conversation takes place, that our interlocutor dislikes switching
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language mode and language choice
ences they produce—that is, the deviations that are due to the deac-
tivated language, such as when one says in English, “He liked very
much the person” based on the French, “Il aimait beaucoup la
personne.”
In a bilingual mode, the base language is normally more active
than the other (“guest”) language, but there are instances when
both need to be fully active, such as when a bilingual person is lis-
tening to two people speaking different languages or when he or
she is interpreting. In the latter case, you need to have access to
both the source language (the entering language) and the target
language (the language you are interpreting into). Note also that
in a bilingual mode the base language can change; one can start
speaking La to an interlocutor and then change over to Lb by
simply flip-flopping the levels of activation of the two languages
(something that can’t be done in the monolingual mode).
Then there is the case of the tri- or quadrilingual person. Figure
4.2 shows how a trilingual’s languages can also be activated to dif-
ferent degrees. The trilingual has chosen Lb as the base language
and has also activated Lc but not La, since the person she is speak-
ing to knows just two of her three languages. She is therefore in a
bilingual mode. With someone who knows the same three lan-
guages she does, and with whom she feels comfortable bringing in
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
La La
Which
language(s) Lb Lb
to use? Answer
Lc Lc
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language mode and language choice
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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language mode and language choice
minutes, one of the people they had talked about folded his news-
paper, turned toward them, and said with a large grin, “Good-bye!”
in Greek.
Usually several factors taken together explain a bilingual’s lan-
guage choice, and some factors have more weight than others. In
her classic book on Guaraní-Spanish bilingualism in Paraguay,
Joan Rubin states that three factors (countryside, school, and pub-
lic functions in the capital city) clearly indicate which language to
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
use (Guaraní for the first factor, Spanish for the other two) but that
the rest can best be placed in a decision tree that orders them.6 At
the very top of the tree is location, then formality, then intimacy,
then seriousness of discourse, and if you have not branched off be-
fore this point, there are still three remaining factors: the first lan-
guage learned, the person’s predicted proficiency, and the sex of
the two participants. Not all language decisions require one to go
through so many steps, but language choice remains complex even
though it is a well-learned behavior that takes place smoothly and
rapidly. Bilinguals are usually quite unaware of the many factors
behind their choice; it is just part of being bilingual.
However hard one tries to find the right language for a given con-
text, it may happen that a satisfactory solution cannot be found. I
observed one such situation when my wife and I were sitting in a
restaurant in the German part of Switzerland one day. I could not
help but notice that the five people at the table right next to ours
did not all share the same languages. I made a sketch of the situa-
tion at their table when I got back home (see Figure 4.3). Clearly the
father, mother, and daughter in the group were visiting from the
United States and had invited the daughter’s grandmother and
great-aunt to dinner. The father and daughter spoke the elders’ lan-
guages (German and French) in addition to speaking the mother’s
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language mode and language choice
GREAT-AUNT
(German, French,
no English)
∅ G
G
MOTHER DAUGHTER
(English, E (English,
no German, ∅ German,
no French) some French)
E G
F/G
E
FATHER GRANDMOTHER
(French, German, (German, French,
F/G
English) no English)
play the most important role in the choice of a base language may
be put aside for a second, less important factor. I was sitting in my
office one day when a student came in and asked in French, with
great hesitancy and a very heavy American accent, whether I was
Professor Grosjean. I replied that I was. Aware of my interlocutor’s
very poor French, and mindful of the importance of establishing
good communication concerning an administrative matter, I sug-
gested in English that we speak English. To my amazement, she did
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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5
Code-Switching and Borrowing
parts mean “go fetch Marc” and “with a hot chocolate,” respec-
tively. There are two ways of calling in the other, “guest” language:
through what is called code-switching (as here) and through bor-
rowing.
Code-Switching
Code-switching is the alternate use of two languages, that is, the
speaker makes a complete shift to another language for a word,
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
of her adult life in France and spoke fluent French. Haney writes
that when Baker returned to the United States on a visit, she was at
a dinner party and was mixing some French into her English in ad-
dition to having sprinkles of French in her American accent. When
she asked an African American maid for a cup of coffee, in French,
the maid exclaimed that Baker was full of —— and told her to speak
the way her mouth was born!2
Negative attitudes like these, as well as the worry that code-
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code-switching and borrowing
that language, then you can simply bring it into what you are say-
ing. The analogy I use is having cream with coffee instead of just
having it black; the word or expression in the other language adds a
little something that is more precise than trying to find an equiva-
lent element in the base language. The following is an example I
have cited many times. My wife and I adopted the word “play-
ground” as a code-switch when we were in the United States, as it
reflected better the kind of free environment kids could have fun
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
in, as compared with the traditional French parc, with its strict
rules and rather poor offering of swing sets. (Since then, I’m happy
to say, things have changed considerably in France and Switzerland
and we, along with others, use a new expression that reflects this,
terrain de jeu.)
A second reason for code-switching is to fill a linguistic need for
a word or an expression. As we saw in Chapter 3 in the discussion of
the complementarity principle, if a domain is covered wholly or
partly by a language other than the one we are speaking, and the
situation is conducive to code-switching, then we will bring in the
words and expressions we need, either because they are the only
ones we have or because they are the most readily available. As a
French-English bilingual once wrote to me:
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code-switching and borrowing
to go to the post office. The passenger gives him a shilling and the
conductor tells him to wait for his change. When the bus nears the
post office and the change still hasn’t been handed over, the passen-
ger tells the conductor that he wants his change. The conductor re-
plies that he’ll get his change. The passenger then switches over to
English and says, “I am nearing my destination.” The switch is an
attempt by the passenger to change his status from equal to higher
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
than the driver and hence to have more authority (English is the
language of the educated elite in Kenya). But in this case, the con-
ductor counters the attempt by saying, in English, “Do you think I
could run away with your change?” thereby reestablishing status
equality between them.6
It is interesting to note that code-switching can also take place in
different modalities. Some bilinguals code-switch when writing, for
example (in letters, e-mail messages, and so on) but they have a ten-
dency to flag the words with quotation marks or by means of un-
derlining. They are aware that the reader might be led astray if this
precaution is not taken. Of course when you are writing for your-
self (for example, taking notes) anything goes, and many of us
bilinguals take multilingual notes full of unflagged switches. Code-
switching can also take place between an oral language and a sign
language. Paul Preston, himself an English–American Sign Lan-
guage bilingual, interviewed a number of bilingual hearing adults,
the children of Deaf parents. While most of the interviews took
place in English, he noticed that his informants would sometimes
switch to sign language. The reasons he gives are very similar to
the ones we have already mentioned: his informants code-switched
when they felt that a sign expressed a concept better, when they
were momentarily unable to think of the English word, when they
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code-switching and borrowing
part maintains its typical English prosodic pattern (a final rise indi-
cating surprise). As for the listener’s perception of a code-switch,
how efficient it is will depend on such factors as the specificity of
sounds and groups of sounds in the guest language (the more spe-
cific, the easier the perception), the existence of a similar-sounding
word in the base language (this has a tendency to delay the percep-
tion), the number and frequency of code-switches, and so on.
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Borrowing
Another way bilinguals bring in their less activated language is
by borrowing a word or short expression from that language and
adapting it morphologically (and often phonologically) into the
base language. Unlike code-switching, which is the alternate use of
two languages, borrowing is the integration of one language into
another. Figure 5.1 illustrates this.
As we can see in the top part of the figure, which depicts a code-
switch, the person speaking Language a (La; empty rectangles)
shifts over completely to Language b (Lb; shaded rectangle) and
then switches back to La (empty rectangles again). With borrowing,
on the other hand, the element borrowed from Lb is integrated
into La; this is shown in the bottom part of the figure by the rect-
angle with diagonal lines, depicting the “blending” of Lb and La.
There are two forms of borrowing. Probably the most frequent is
when both the form and the content of a word are borrowed (to
Code-switch
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Borrowing
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code-switching and borrowing
borrowings in Spanish: “el trainer,” “esa girl” (this girl), and “la
responsibility.”11 Note that when a borrowing comes into a sentence
and does not require a morphological marking, and if is not pho-
nologically integrated—that is, pronounced with the phonetics of
the base language—it is difficult to distinguish it from a one-word
code-switch. This has caused much debate among specialists about
whether we are dealing with a code-switch or a borrowing.
A second type of borrowing, called a loanshift, occurs when the
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
speaker either takes a word in the base language and extends its
meaning to correspond to that of a word in the other language, or
rearranges words in the base language along a pattern provided by
the other language and thus creates a new meaning. An example of
the first kind of loanshift would be the use of humoroso by Portu-
guese Americans to mean “humorous” when its original meaning
in Portuguese is “capricious.” Another example would be soportar in
Puerto-Rican Spanish; it normally means “to endure” but has now
also been given the English meaning “to support.” As for the re-
arranging of words, also called calques or loan translations, an ex-
ample was noted in Florida in the Spanish speech of bilinguals
who said tener buen tiempo (based on the English “to have a good
time”) instead of using the Spanish divertirse.12 Another example of
this kind would be: “I put myself to think about it,” said by a
Spanish-English bilingual, based on the Spanish expression me puse
a pensarlo.13
Why do bilinguals borrow? The reasons are very similar to the
ones given for code-switching, although there are fewer communi-
cative strategies in play. Using the right word is at the top of the
list, along with using a word from a domain covered by the other
language (yet one more example of the complementarity principle
at work). Linguists have spent considerable time explaining why
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code-switching and borrowing
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Who could have thought that seven hundred years later the situa-
tion would be reversed, with English influencing French.
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6
Speaking and Writing
Monolingually
Choosing a Language
At first sight, choosing a language for communicating in a mono-
lingual mode appears to be a simple operation. We “shut off” our
other language or languages and speak just one. After all, if we were
to start speaking a language that our interlocutors did not know,
we wouldn’t get very far. As the Yaqui Indian mentioned earlier
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speaking and writing monolingually
not needed, whereas I take a “softer” stance and advocate the deac-
tivation of those languages but not their inhibition.3 I believe that
the bilingual language system has to allow for switching back and
forth between a monolingual and a bilingual mode, and that even
in a monolingual mode, as we will see below, the speaker can call
upon the other deactivated language. This is more difficult to do
when a language is inhibited than when it is deactivated.
Neurologists and neurolinguists have recently conducted brain-
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speaking and writing monolingually
cally into the base language, thus borrowing them in. There are no
rules here. On the one hand, we don’t want to sound too sophis-
ticated or distant by switching over to the other language. It is
also important that our interlocutors understand us, and code-
switching might cause miscomprehension. On the other hand,
adapting a name into the base language might distort it too much
or detach it from reality. After all, an American friend named Jona-
than just doesn’t seem to be the same person when his name is pro-
nounced in French. Deciding whether to say the proper noun in its
original form or adapt it to the language being spoken will depend
on many factors, but the central factors are clear communication
and not distancing oneself too much from interlocutors. When I
lived in the United States, I would anglicize my family name and
then spell it out; giving the French version was not a solution, as
most people simply wouldn’t understand it.
Proper nouns aside, bilinguals may well code-switch momen-
tarily when in a monolingual mode, either because they have not
mastered the language that well (as when a highly dominant bilin-
gual is speaking in his weaker language) or they do not have the re-
quired vocabulary for that particular domain in the language they
are speaking (the complementarity principle). When they code-
switch out of the blue like this, their interlocutors will often be
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
several languages even if they prefer not to speak them, and they
are ready to help out a bit. I once heard an American professor say
on a French radio program during an interview, “Il n’est pas ruth-
less” (He’s not ruthless). The reporter, who wanted the interview to
be understandable to the listeners, came in immediately with the
French expression, “sans scrupules.” The professor said, “Oui . . .”
and then continued what he had been saying.
If the interlocutor does not seem to know the bilingual speaker’s
other languages, then a code-switch will need to be accompanied by
an explanation. One produces the word or expression in the other
(guest) language, perhaps with a preceding phrase such as, “In lan-
guage X we say . . . ,” and then one proceeds. Of course, this cannot
be done too often, because it slows down the interaction and may
not be looked upon favorably by those listening.
Interferences
Despite the fact that bilinguals sometimes want to keep out their
other languages when they are speaking or writing monolin-
gually, and although they may have filtered out all code-switches,
the other languages can still enter in the form of interferences: de-
viations from the language being spoken (or written) stemming
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speaking and writing monolingually
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speaking and writing monolingually
him where his father was. The interference comes from the Norwe-
gian stova, which means living room.6 In these two examples, the
base- and guest-language words resemble each other to a large ex-
tent (they are near homophones, and near homographs when writ-
ten; often called “false friends”), but that does not have to be the
case, as we see in the example “Don’t move the needles on the clock,”
based on the French word aiguilles (which means both needles and
hands of a clock); the word should have been “hands.” These acci-
dental borrowings (loanshifts) can occur frequently in a bilingual’s
language because the words pronounced are definitely those of the
base language and the bilingual believes he or she is speaking just
one language, and yet the words are used with the wrong mean-
ing. Nancy Huston, the Canadian and French bilingual writer, re-
ports that she ends up avoiding the use of false friends such as
éventuellement and “eventually,” “harassed” and harassé, to make sure
that she won’t mix them up.7
Interferences at the level of idiomatic expressions and proverbs
are also very frequent and particularly difficult to filter out. Bilin-
guals may translate them literally from the other language into the
language they are speaking and not be aware that the meaning is
not always transparent. Hence, “I’m telling myself stories” is a lit-
eral English translation of the French expression “je me raconte des
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histoires”; the bilingual speaker should have said, “I’m kidding my-
self.”8 Another example would be the literal translation of “as alike
as two peas in a pod,” which would not mean anything in French;
one should say “comme deux gouttes d’eau” (literally, “like two
drops of water”). Here are two examples where the literal English
translation of a German expression comes close but isn’t quite
right: “Winter is before the door” is based on “Winter steht vor der
Tür”; the English expression is “Winter is around the corner.” And
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
“He was laughing in his fist” comes from “Er hat sich ins Fäustchen
gelacht”; the correct English expression is “He was laughing up his
sleeve.”9
Interferences at the level of syntax are also quite frequent, such as
when bilingual speakers use the word-order pattern of one lan-
guage in the other, insert determiners when they are not normally
present, use the wrong preposition (again based on the deactivated
language), and so on. For example, if French-English bilinguals say
“on the page five” instead of “on page five,” they are probably think-
ing of the French equivalent, “sur la page cinq.” The same is true of
“I saw that at the television,” based on “J’ai vu ça à la télévision.”
As for interferences when writing, many are similar to the ones
that crop up in spoken language at different linguistic levels (for
example, lexical and syntactic). Among the things that are spe-
cific to writing, though, one finds spelling differences between lan-
guages. For instance, near homographs—that is, words that are
spelled only slightly differently in two languages—are often a prob-
lem. Many English-French bilinguals have to stop and think about
how many d’s there are in “address” (there is only one in French),
how many p’s in “development” (there are two in French), if there
are two h’s or not in “rhythm” (there is only one in French), and so
on. Personally, I bless the development of grammar and spelling
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speaking and writing monolingually
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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speaking and writing monolingually
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
that of the high jumper and that of the sprinter, but is neither one
alone.
In sum, the influences of the other language, notably in the form
of interferences, are present in bilingual language but they do not
usually affect communication. I would even suggest that they may
render what is said more original and less stereotypical. As we will
see, the prose of such bilingual writers as Joseph Conrad and Sam-
uel Beckett contains traces of their other language. Interferences
greatly enriched their writing and helped make it what it is.
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7
Having an Accent in a Language
does not make someone less or more bilingual. Some extremely flu-
ent and balanced bilinguals have an accent in one or the other of
their languages; other less fluent bilinguals may have no accent at
all. The world is full of respected scholars, writers, politicians, and
others who are bilingual and speak with an accent in one of their
languages.
Take, for example, the illustrious author Joseph Conrad, men-
tioned briefly at the end of the preceding chapter. What one tends
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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having an accent in a language
woman who had learned English when she came over to the United
States with her husband, whom she had met on a U.S. military base
in France. She had lived in the Midwest, far removed from any
French speakers, and she had rarely returned to France. When I met
her, some twenty years later, she spoke French with a rather strong
American English accent: her intonation in French was English, her
stop consonants (“p,” “t,” “k”) were aspirated and no longer French,
and so on. She was very conscious of the change and I spent the
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
greater part of our conversation telling her it was quite natural that
she would have an accent in French, given the circumstances of
her life.
What about an accent in a third or a fourth language: where does
it come from? It really depends on when and where one has ac-
quired the language. For example, I acquired my Italian in my teens
when English was my stronger language (although it’s not my first
language), and so I have an English accent in Italian. Had I ac-
quired it earlier, I might have a French accent in Italian or no accent
at all. One should also note that a bilingual can have an accent in
all of his or her languages. This can happen, for example, when a bi-
lingual has spent her early years going back and forth between two
or more linguistic communities (for example, between Germany,
Italy, and England). Again, there is nothing wrong with having ac-
cents in several languages, although the bilingual may feel that she
speaks no language correctly. This is false, of course. Having an ac-
cent is not an indication of how well one has mastered a language.
Researchers do not agree on an age limit distinguishing between
the likelihood of not having an accent in a second language and
having one. Some have proposed that a language can be “accent-
less” if it is acquired before age six, and that the window (what
some call the sensitive period) remains open until age twelve.1 There
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having an accent in a language
they didn’t have to work hard to attain this fluency, they tell me.
Despite such accounts, early learning—acquiring a second or third
language in early childhood, and using it extensively—is a good
guarantee for “accentless” speech. (I put “accentless” in quotes be-
cause all speech is accented, by definition, although not in the
sense used here.)
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
his parents (say, a Swiss French father and a Swiss German mother)
moved to the German part of Switzerland when he was young and
he acquired French rather late in life. People may be taken aback by
his accent and wonder why he has it, but it is not that surprising
when they know the full story. Another disadvantage to accents
that is mentioned by many is that stress and emotion can make
an accent reappear or increase in strength. Canadian and French bi-
lingual author Nancy Huston reports that her English accent in
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having an accent in a language
Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, has
a strong English accent in French, but the French love it when he
gives speeches in their language, especially as he invariably makes
them laugh with his British humor with its irony, innuendo, and
deadpan style. Numerous performing artists have played on their
accent to appeal to their audience, such as French singer Maurice
Chevalier and Italian actor Roberto Benigni when performing in
English, and British singers Petula Clark and Jane Birkin when per-
forming in French. I have also known of cases in which an accent
was a major factor in a person’s falling in love with someone (al-
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8
Languages across the Lifespan
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7 years old 17 years old
D La D Lb
Language Language Lc
use use
La
N N
L H L H
Language fluency Language fluency
Language Lb Language
use use
Ld La
N Lc N Lc
L H L H
Language fluency Language fluency
60 years old
D La
Lb
Language
use
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N Ld Lc
L H
Language fluency
Figure 8.1. The wax and wane of languages in a bilingual. The axis for
language use goes from never used (N, bottom) to daily use (D, top),
and that for language fluency from low fluency (L, left) to high fluency
(H, right). The four languages in question are French (La), English (Lb),
Italian (Lc), and American Sign Language (Ld).
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languages across the lifespan
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
and fill in the grids in Figure 8.1 for points just before major changes
in his or her own language history. One could also examine the flu-
ency and use of each language skill (speaking, listening, reading,
writing) at each stage; this would entail filling in four grids per
stage.
A few general comments can be made based on my particular
language history. (I kept it quite factual for the purpose of illustrat-
ing the chapter. Of course, it was also a very human experience with
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languages across the lifespan
its ups and its downs, especially at age eighteen—but that is an-
other story.) First, as we can see, an individual language history can
be quite complex. In my case this was because of repeated immi-
gration. Other bilinguals may have more straightforward histories
(for example, those who live on language borders or in multilin-
gual countries), but important life events may nevertheless change
the relative importance of their languages—events such as starting
school (and learning to read and write in one or several languages),
getting a job, settling down with a spouse, or losing a close family
member with whom a language was used exclusively.
Second, we see that this is a dynamic process in which new situa-
tions, new interlocutors, and new language functions involve new
linguistic needs (recall the complementarity principle). New needs
will change the bilingual person’s language configuration. Typically
there are periods of stability, of varying duration, and then periods
of language reorganization during which an existing language may
be strengthened, another one may lose its importance, yet another
may be acquired, and so on. One should be careful not to judge a
person’s bilingualism during these transition periods, as the skills
required by the new environment may not be fully in place. It is also
during these periods that bilinguals need to be reassured about
what is happening to them. Even if their general level of communi-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
guals who have started their lives with one language as the domi-
nant language and then at some point, after a transition, found
it replaced by a second language. One should be careful, there-
fore, not to think that the bilingual’s first language, or mother
tongue, is the stronger, most fundamental language; it really de-
pends on the individual’s language history and, as we have seen, on
the complementarity principle. Finally, an examination of bilin-
guals’ language history will help counter another false idea:
Language Forgetting
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languages across the lifespan
the process of being forgotten at the time of the study. This person
first learned Hungarian, followed by Polish at age four when he
moved to Poland. He seemed to have “lost” his Hungarian then, un-
til he returned to Hungary at age six. At age ten he moved to Roma-
nia, where he learned both Romanian, in school and with friends,
and Yiddish, spoken socially. He returned to Hungary at age twelve
where, in school, he studied German, English, and Hebrew. He then
spent six years in Germany, where he went to college, and German
became his dominant language. At age twenty-five he left for the
United States, where English became his primary language. His
wife is Hungarian but they mainly use English in the home. When
Galloway met this person, he was actively using only two languages,
English and Hungarian; three were dormant, on the way to being
forgotten, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish; and two were all but for-
gotten, Romanian and Polish.1
Language forgetting is a phenomenon that is probably as com-
mon as language learning, and yet it has received little attention in
the past. This is now changing, thanks to the work of such re-
searchers as Monika Schmid, Barbara Köpke, and Kees de Bot,
among others. When the domains of use of a language are consid-
erably reduced, if not simply absent, the process of language forget-
ting will begin, and it will extend over many years. It can be ob-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
and they are just as interesting linguistically. But the attitudes one
has toward them are very different. Whereas language acquisition is
seen positively (“Oh, you’re learning Spanish, how wonderful!”),
language forgetting is not talked about in such terms and those
who are losing a language often experience regret if not remorse.
These feelings may be even stronger if one’s name is linked with the
language in question. Hence, an Italian American person with an
Italian name may find herself having to explain, and lamenting, the
loss of the Italian she no longer ever uses.
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languages across the lifespan
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
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languages across the lifespan
squares appeared either on the left or the right side of the screen.
In congruent trials, the red square appeared above the “X” key and
the blue square above the “O” key; in the incongruent trials, the red
square appeared above the “O” key and the blue square appeared
above the “X” key. The authors’ findings replicated the well-attested
congruency effect: the subjects were faster in responding when the
colored square appeared on the same side as its corresponding key
(for example, when the red square was on the same side as the “X”
key), and slower when the color and the key were not on the same
side. This is known as the Simon effect. What is even more interest-
ing, though, is that the bilingual subjects in the older group were
faster than a matched monolingual group, on both the congruent
and the incongruent trials.5 In a control study, the authors ruled
out the possibility that the speed difference was due to baseline dif-
ferences between the groups.
The authors’ explanation for the elderly bilinguals’ advantage
was that the need to manage two active language systems, and to
manipulate attention to one or the other, or both, during language
use, is carried out by the same general executive (cognitive) func-
tions that are responsible for managing attention to any set of sys-
tems or stimuli. In other words, a lifetime of activities such as lan-
guage choice, which forces bilinguals to activate one language and
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
shows that being bilingual may well delay the development of de-
mentia in old age. Dementia is a general term applied to cognitive
disorders that have an impact on memory, language, motor and
spatial skills, problem solving, and attention. Alzheimer’s disease is
the most common cause of dementia; others include brain injury,
brain tumors, and so on. The authors examined 184 patients diag-
nosed with dementia, 51 percent of whom were bilingual. The latter
were fluent in English (the language of the monolinguals) as well
as another language (in all, they represented twenty-five different
languages). The bilingual subjects had spent the majority of their
lives, at least from early adulthood, regularly using both languages.
When the authors compared the age of onset of the symptoms of
dementia in the two groups, they found that the bilinguals had a
mean age of onset 4.1 years later than the monolinguals (at 75.5
years versus 71.4 years). The authors argue, once again, that the
attentional control that bilinguals use to govern their languages—
choosing one or the other or both, keeping one suppressed while
activating the other (at least when communicating in the monolin-
gual mode)—is akin to other complex mental activities that appear
to protect against dementia. They conclude tentatively (the find-
ings are still recent) that while bilingualism does not appear to af-
fect the accumulation of pathological factors associated with de-
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9
Attitudes and Feelings
about Bilingualism
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
tioned as a real advantage for those who know and use more than
one language in everyday life. Bilingualism is reported to foster
open-mindedness, offer different perspectives on life, and reduce
cultural ignorance. A more instrumental advantage is also men-
tioned: bilingualism may lead to more job opportunities and
greater social mobility, and may also be a real advantage in one’s
current occupation. I have known people who were offered a partic-
ular job, or new responsibilities, precisely because they knew one or
two additional languages. In a large European Union survey con-
ducted in twenty-nine countries in 2006, the job factor was men-
tioned many times in respondents’ answers to the question, “What
would be your main reasons for learning a new language?” A third
of the respondents answered, “To use at work (including traveling
abroad on business)” and a fourth indicated, “To be able to work in
another country” and “To get a better job in your own country.”5
Other advantages put forward for being bilingual are that it al-
lows one to help others, it creates a bond with other bilinguals, and
it sometimes allows one to understand what others may not. The
final report on the European Union survey summarizes many of
the advantages given above:
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attitudes and feelings about bilingualism
All the advantages cited above are important for daily life, and
quality of life, and show clearly why it is crucial to encourage and
foster bilingualism. But they can never compare with such excep-
tional moments as when lives were spared precisely because of
bilingualism. Here are two examples. A Bengali-Urdu-English tri-
lingual once told me that when Bangladesh had its war of inde-
pendence in 1971 against Pakistan, he was arrested by a Pakistani
Punjabi/Urdu platoon one day and was on the verge of being shot.
Although Bengali himself, he managed to be released because he
showed his captors that he could speak Urdu and that he could re-
cite a few verses of the Koran in Arabic. The second example con-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
sleeping right there in the dining room). Bohny spoke good French
(he was Swiss German) and managed to delay things by convincing
the officers to go back to the village to phone their headquarters.
While they were away, he roused the children and quickly sent them
out to the farms that surrounded the village. When the police came
back, Bohny told them that the children were gone. His own suit-
case was ready, as he thought he would be taken to prison, but
nothing came of it and he managed to continue his exemplary
work until the end of the war.
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attitudes and feelings about bilingualism
Rodriguez tells us that his father was not shy but that he simply
didn’t master English as well as Spanish; when speaking the latter,
he would convey a confidence and authority not expressed in En-
glish.
Another disadvantage bilinguals mention concerns the influence
of their stronger language on a weaker one. Some bilinguals report
that, when speaking monolingually, they often have to struggle to
keep code-switches and borrowings out and they have to put up
with interferences that increase in number as they get tired, ner-
vous, angry, or worried. In fact, the fear of having languages “con-
taminate” one another has pushed a few people not to learn or use
another language at all, even when their environment encourages
them to do so. A good example is that of the French writer, poet,
and surrealist André Breton, who spent time in the United States
during World War II (he worked for the U.S. Office of War Informa-
tion). He is reported to have refused to speak and write in English,
although his passive knowledge of the language was good. The rea-
son he gave was that he didn’t want his French to be affected by En-
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attitudes and feelings about bilingualism
swered that they did not, except for the fact that they have more
languages and hence can communicate with more people.
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
very supportive of their inhabitants who live their lives with two
or more languages. Here is what linguist Barry McLaughlin said
about this some while back, in 1978:
Have things changed since then? In fact attitudes and feelings sim-
ply do not change that fast, as Aneta Pavlenko, a contemporary re-
searcher in bilingualism and herself an immigrant to the United
States, attests. She writes that bilinguals are often viewed with sus-
picion either as linguistic and cultural hybrids who may be in con-
flict with themselves, or as individuals whose shifting linguistic
allegiances imply shifting political allegiances and moral commit-
ments.12
The immigrant literature is unfortunately rife with examples of
discrimination against immigrants who are also bilingual. I have al-
ways personally regretted that large, rather monolingual countries
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10
Bilinguals Who Are Also
Bicultural
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
A B
Figure 10.1. A bicultural person’s combination of two cultures (culture
A, the dominant culture, and culture B), along with the blending com-
ponent (shaded oval).
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
this dominance does not make a person any less bicultural). In the
illustration, we see by the relative size of the squares that culture A
is more important than culture B. In a bicultural’s lifetime, cul-
tures can wax and wane, become dominant for a while before tak-
ing a secondary role. In my own case, I feel that I have changed my
dominant culture four times since becoming bicultural: it was En-
glish in my teenage years, French until age twenty-eight, American
until I was forty, and it has been Swiss since then.
People can become bicultural at any time during their life: in
childhood, when a child is born into a bicultural family; when a
child starts going to school; in adolescence, if the young person
moves from one culture to another; and, of course, in adulthood, as
with immigrants who settle down in a new country and, over the
years, become bicultural. Concerning the latter, the stages that take
place in migration are now well studied—arrival, isolation, culture
shock, and more or less rapid acculturation. This last stage is af-
fected by the size and concentration of the migrant group, the
number of children in the family, the host country’s attitude to-
ward the group in question, and so on. The literature also men-
tions the migrants’ idealization of their home country, the return
shock they experience when they see that “back home” no longer
matches their dreams and memories, and the more or less perma-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Acting Biculturally
Bilinguals who are also bicultural may find themselves at various
points along a situational continuum that requires different types
of behavior depending on their situation. At one end they are in a
monocultural mode, since they are with monoculturals or with
biculturals with whom they share only one culture. In this situa-
tion they must deactivate as best they can their other cultures. At
the other end of the continuum they are with other biculturals
who share their cultures. With them, they will use a base culture to
interact in (the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs of one culture) and
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A B C
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
all, it consists of one brief air kiss; in France, you kiss someone on
both cheeks; and in Switzerland, you kiss them three times. Things
get even more complex when you meet a Swiss friend in France.
(Should it be two kisses, the French way, or three, the Swiss way?)
Finally, when trying to attract a waiter’s attention in a French café,
I just can’t bring myself to be quite as conspicuous as the normal
French customer. Instead of saying, “Garçon!” with a loudish voice,
I try to attract the waiter’s attention through eye contact and by
raising my hand meekly (which invariably leads to failure, at least
for the first few tries).
All biculturals who are reading this can add their favorite exam-
ples of cultural blends in domains such as the hand gestures to use
with someone, the amount of space to leave between yourself and
the other, what to talk about (in some cultures, for example, you
don’t talk about salaries with people you don’t know), how much
to tip, and so on. Paul Preston, who has interviewed a number of
bilingual-bicultural people who have Deaf parents, mentions that
prolonged eye contact, something crucial in Deaf culture, makes
hearing people feel uncomfortable and hence they try not to use
it that much with them.4 Another example concerns the compli-
cated tu versus vous form of address in French. An English-French
bicultural friend related something that happened to her as she
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
causing the other guests; it was only when she left that
the others asked me why I had been so insulting to her.
Hadn’t I noticed that everyone else said “vous” to her? I
realized that the relationships covered by their term
“amie” and my unconscious translation “friend” were not
equivalent. For me a friend is someone to be friendly
with, whereas one may not necessarily be “amical” with
an “amie.”5
Biculturals will invariably say that life is easier when they are in
a bicultural mode—that is, with other biculturals like themselves.
Bilingualism expert Aneta Pavlenko, herself a Russian-English
bilingual-bicultural person, sent me the following example:
The bicultural teenagers know that the others are intimate with
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
both of their languages and cultures and that they will understand
when they intermix the cultures in their behavior or in what they
say. These are precious moments, when the bicultural person can
relax and not have to worry about getting things right each time.
Bicultural bilinguals often state that their good friends (or their
“dream” partners) are people like them, with whom they can be to-
tally relaxed about going back and forth between their languages
and cultures.
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
als, and yet in France they are considered as Arab foreigners and are
often discriminated against: their identification papers are checked
frequently, they are often mistreated by the police, and they are
sometimes threatened with deportation.
Faced with such sometimes contradictory perceptions, bicul-
turals have to reach a decision regarding their own cultural iden-
tity. They take into account how they are seen by the cultures they
belong to, as well as such other factors as their personal history,
their identity needs, their knowledge of the languages and cultures
involved, the country they live in, the groups they belong to. The
outcome, after a long and sometimes trying process, is to identify
solely with culture A, solely with culture B, with neither culture A
nor culture B, or with both culture A and culture B.8 The first three
solutions—that is, only A, only B, neither A nor B—are often unsat-
isfactory in the long run, even if they might be temporary answers.
They do not truly reflect the bicultural person who has roots in two
cultures, and they may have negative consequences later on. Those
who choose to identify with just one culture (whether freely or
when pushed to do so) are basically turning away from one of their
two cultures, and they may later become dissatisfied with their
decision. As for those who reject both cultures, they often feel
marginalized or ambivalent about their life. Hence the terms and
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
The fourth route, where one identifies with both cultures, A and
B, is the optimal solution since biculturals live their lives within
two cultures, combining and blending aspects of each one, even
when one culture is dominant. Some biculturals are helped by the
existence of new cultural groups, such as the immigrant groups
in North America. Identifying with Cuban Americans, or Haitian
Americans, for example, and being able to use those labels, is a fine
way of telling others that you are of dual heritage, Cuban and
American or Haitian and American, and that you wish to be recog-
nized as a bicultural individual.
For isolated biculturals, finally identifying with both cultures
and admitting openly to being bicultural (and not simply neither A
nor B, as many biculturals say) may take time or may actually
never be possible. In his autobiography, Olivier Todd, the Franco-
British journalist and writer, clearly shows throughout his book
Carte d’identités that he has been in search of his dual and combined
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
identity, despite the fact that when he was a young man French
philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre once told him that his
problem was that he was divided between England and France.
Todd applauds projects between the two countries, such as the
Channel Tunnel, and he feels most comfortable with people who
have his dual heritage—his mother, his first wife, Anne-Marie, and
many bicultural friends. Even though he never actually uses the
term “bicultural” (but then, how many biculturals do?), one clearly
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bilinguals who are also bicultural
I had the privilege of meeting Olivier Todd just before I wrote this
book, and I asked him about his biculturalism. I stressed the fact
that one could be both A and B even if one culture is dominant. He
very kindly responded that I was right and that he was, indeed,
bicultural.
The writer Veronica Chambers relates how she progressively dis-
covered her dual identity and how a trip to Panama allowed her to
go “from being a lone Black girl with a curious Latin heritage to be-
ing part of the Latinegro tribe or the Afro-Antillianos.” She con-
tinues:
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11
Personality,
Thinking and Dreaming,
and Emotions in Bilinguals
I
n Chapter 3, I mentioned how bilinguals deal with
well-learned mental processes such as counting, praying, remem-
bering phone numbers, and so on. In this chapter, we will examine
some other topics that often come up regarding bilinguals. Do they
change personality when they change language? What language do
they think in or dream in? And how do they express their emo-
tions? Such questions are fascinating, as are the answers.
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per sonality, t hinking and dr eaming, emotions
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per sonality, t hinking and dr eaming, emotions
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
they are not actually fluent in that language. The linguist Veroboj
Vildomec reported that a multilingual who spoke some Russian
dreamed that he was speaking fluent Russian. But when he woke
up, he realized that it had been in fact a mixture of Czech and
Slovak, with a bit of Russian, and not fluent Russian after all.
Vildomec added that other bilinguals reported producing interfer-
ences during their dreams, that is, deviations in a language due to
another language, even though they rarely made any when awake.12
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per sonality, t hinking and dr eaming, emotions
Emotions in Bilinguals
A particularly complex, and fascinating, aspect of bilingualism is
how bilinguals deal with emotions in their languages:
This is not to say that some bilinguals do not prefer to express their
emotions in their first, often their dominant, language. Think of all
those bilinguals who have lived in the same place all their lives, who
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
use their first language with their family and friends, who learned
their second and third languages in adolescence, and who basically
use the latter as work languages. It makes sense that they will ex-
press affect in their most-used language, that is, their first lan-
guage. But as Pavlenko writes, it would be too simplistic to posit
that late bilinguals have emotional ties only with their first lan-
guage and have no such ties with their other languages.14
Some bilinguals who have had a traumatic experience in their
first language, for example, may decide not to use it any longer
when they are in a position to do so. Pavlenko cites Monika
Schmid, a linguist who has worked a lot on language forgetting,
who mentioned a married couple who had known each other in
Germany just before the war, before emigrating. Because of the
trauma of what they had lived through during the war, in more
than fifty years of marriage they had never spoken German to each
other, their first language, not even intimately.15 There is also the
case of the historian and author Gerda Lerner, who had joined the
anti-Nazi resistance in Austria before emigrating in 1939 at age
nineteen. Once settled in the United States, she refused to use her
first language; she was repelled by it in every way. It was only some
thirty years later that she reconciled herself with German.
Even without having lived through a traumatic experience, bilin-
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
guals may prefer using their second language over their first to con-
vey emotions. One English-French bilingual, who had grown up in
England and moved to France at age twenty-one, offered the follow-
ing testimony:
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12
Bilingual Writers
but they may not feel totally at ease doing so. However, in the small
world of professional literary writing, one finds marked exceptions
involving bilinguals. There are some bilingual authors who write
books in their second (or third) language—an incredible feat when
one thinks about how hard it is to write literature in one’s own na-
tive language. And, even more exceptional, there are those who
write literature in both of their languages. This chapter will be
about these outstanding writers.
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bilingual writers
the French poet and novelist Louis Aragon, and the two had par-
allel literary careers. Her first book in French was Good Evening,
Theresa, in 1938. It was followed by many other works, including A
Fine of Two Hundred Francs, which was awarded the prestigious Prix
Goncourt.
Elizabeth Beaujour has analyzed the reasons that led such au-
thors to shift over to writing in their second (or third) language.
One obvious reason is to be able to write for a wider audience. If
you live in a country other than the one in whose language you are
writing (you live in France and are writing in Russian, for example),
you simply don’t have that many readers for your works, even if the
émigré community is quite large (as it happened to be for Nabokov
and Triolet).
A second reason has to do with how the works are translated into
the author’s other language (Triolet’s books in Russian, for exam-
ple, were translated into French). Bilingual authors are rarely happy
with the job that outside translators do with their work and they
often edit the translations extensively. In the end, they frequently
resort to translating their own works into their other language.
But the process of self-translation turns out to be particularly tor-
menting for many (Beaujour talks of “the hell of self-translation”),
and many bilingual authors express dissatisfaction with their own
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
work, and that once she has finished translating a work, she sud-
denly feels that she could never have written the work in the other
language!11 In 2005 Huston won the prestigious Prix Femina for
Ligne de faille, which she had in fact first written in English (Fault
Lines) and then translated into French.
While bilingual authors generally choose one language in which
to write, writing in their first language only, or their second (or
third), or alternating from one to the other, depending on the cir-
cumstance, a few decide to write bilingual works in which both lan-
guages are present on the same page (see Chapter 5 for a presenta-
tion of the bilingual language mode). Elizabeth Beaujour finds that
in the twilight of their career, most bilingual writers are not satis-
fied keeping their two languages separate. They are in search of
unity and wish their writing to exist in both languages. They can
achieve this by making sure that all of their works are published in
both languages (something that Beckett did, and Huston is cur-
rently doing), and they can have their characters act as bilinguals
do, in a monolingual and also a bilingual way. Beaujour mentions
Nabokov who, in Ada, had his characters speak three languages and
shift from one language to another quite freely.12
Today, one does not need to be so advanced in one’s literary ca-
reer to write bilingually, as can be seen in the prose of two Hispanic
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13
Special Bilinguals
Second-Language Teachers
Teachers of second languages are also often called foreign-language
teachers, although this can be a misnomer when the language they
teach is used by millions of speakers in that country, such as Span-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
ish in the United States or Arabic in France. There are two kinds
of second-language teachers. First, there are those who teach the
country’s language, or languages, to others, mainly foreigners (for
example, instructors of English as a second language who teach En-
glish to newly arrived immigrants in the United States). These
teachers do not have to be bilingual in order to do their job and so
we will not say much about them here.
Second, one finds teachers who teach a language other than the
country’s main language or languages. Examples would be teachers
of German in England, teachers of English in Italy, and so on. They
themselves form two groups. In the first group you find those who
acquired the language they teach as a second language, in school or
college. They may also have had a short stay in a country where the
language they specialize in is used. This is the case with Ms. Wright,
for example, who teaches Spanish at a high school in the Boston
area. She took modern languages in college, studied Spanish and
French, and then spent six months in Mexico. In the second group,
you find native speakers of the language who have moved to an-
other country and now teach their mother tongue. This is the case
with Ms. Lopez, who teaches Spanish alongside Ms. Wright in the
same school. She is originally Venezuelan and she moved to the
United States as an adult after having gone to college in Caracas.
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special bilinguals
cent in it, just like normal bilinguals, but they are special bilinguals
in a number of ways. First, some, like Ms. Wright, do not use the
language they teach outside the classroom very much, since they do
not often have a need for it in everyday communication outside of
work. Note, though, that this is not the case for Ms. Lopez, who has
many Spanish-speaking friends and who uses both English and
Spanish outside of school.
Second, they have insights into the linguistics of the language
that normal language users do not have. For instance, how many
speakers of English can explain, in a pedagogical way, the differ-
ence between the prepositions “for,” “since,” and “ago”? How many
speakers of French can explain, in a clear manner, all the rules of
the French past participle?
Third, second-language teachers are in a bilingual mode when
teaching. When they are using the second language (for example,
Spanish) overtly in class, they also have their other language (En-
glish here) available in case a student asks a question in it or code-
switches for a word or expression. But they themselves may resort
very rarely to code-switches and borrowings in front of students,
and they may well correct those who slip into their better-known
language.
Thus, in moments that would normally be conducive to code-
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
ing will find themselves lacking the vocabulary and also, at times,
the linguistic skills and stylistic varieties needed to accomplish the
translation. They may also lack the cultural knowledge attached to
a language that would facilitate their understanding of the original
text—a necessary step to be able to translate correctly.
Unlike regular bilinguals, translators and interpreters must have
a complete set of translation equivalents in the other language.
They must also know the two languages fluently (at all linguistic
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special bilinguals
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
add all the linguistic and cognitive skills that allow interpreters to
go from hearing oral input in one language to producing oral out-
put in the other language, either simultaneously or successively.1
This involves, among other things, careful listening, processing and
comprehending the input in the source language, memorizing it,
formulating the translation in the target language, and then articu-
lating it, not to mention dual tasking (letting the next sequence
come in as you are outputting the preceding one), note taking in
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
Secret Agents
Many of us believe that agents who work for intelligence services
are probably bilingual and bicultural, in the image of Jack Hig-
gins’s Kurt Steiner in The Eagle Has Landed, a novel about a German
attempt to kidnap Winston Churchill during World War II. In the
story, Steiner’s father was a major general in the German army and
his mother was American. Steiner himself, the leader of a German
commando unit, had been brought up in both England and Ger-
many and was perfectly bilingual.
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special bilinguals
duties brought him into contact with the atomic bomb project (no-
tably, aspects dealing with the fuel used). What he learned was ex-
tremely valuable for the development of the Russian bomb, which
was detonated for the first time in 1949. Koval was a very successful
agent not only because he was intelligent and well trained (this gave
him access to the heart of the bomb project) but also because he
was a “genuine” American. He spoke fluent English, he loved base-
ball, and he was just a regular guy. He fled back to the Soviet Union
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special bilinguals
was British and, much to his surprise, they let him go, as they
were friendly with the Resistance.3 Unfortunately, other SOE agents
were not as lucky as Millar. Francis Suttill, the head of a “circuit”
(Resistance network) in the Paris region, had a very poor accent in
French, despite having a French mother. To make sure he was un-
derstood, he had to rely on the help of a “courier,” a young French
SOE agent, Andrée Borrel. In addition to the problem of Suttill’s
strong accent, apparently some of Suttill’s agents would get to-
gether in black-market restaurants and would talk things over—in
English.4
Suttill’s circuit (named Prosper) was penetrated by the Germans
and many agents were caught and imprisoned. After they had been
interrogated, they were sent to concentration camps in Germany.
Unfortunately, very few managed to survive the ordeal. The reasons
for the Prosper disaster are many (one being that there was a traitor
among the SOE agents) and a lack of linguistic skills probably does
not rank among them. But had the bilingualism and biculturalism
of the British agents been total—something one does not expect in
regular bilinguals—and had some of them been more careful with
their language behavior in public, their chances of remaining free
would probably have been better. Nevertheless, these agents were
extremely devoted and courageous, and one can only have gratitude
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Well-Known Bilinguals
I will end with a few special bilinguals or multilinguals who are
well-known people. In the first category are individuals who are
outstanding learners and speakers of many languages. They are
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b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s
often called polyglots or even linguists (in the sense of being multi-
lingual). Such people are talked about with wonder by monolin-
guals who go through life with just one language, and by regular
bilinguals who may know “only” three or four languages to varying
degrees, as is my case. One such person who is often mentioned is
Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who lived astride the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and was reported to speak fluently some
fifty to sixty languages. Another polyglot often evoked is the British
explorer, ethnologist, and diplomat Sir Richard Francis Burton,
who lived in the nineteenth century. He is reported to have ac-
quired four languages in his youth and then some twenty-five oth-
ers as an adult, including Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, Persian,
and Arabic, not to mention many dialects. Burton lived in India,
among other places, and explored the Arabian Peninsula and the
upper Nile region, and hence made good use of the languages that
he acquired.
Professional linguists who study languages as well as language
structure and language processing usually know just a few lan-
guages, but some are true polyglots. For example, Mario Pei, an
Italian American linguist in the past century, and a best-selling au-
thor in his field, was reported to be able to speak some forty lan-
guages and to be acquainted with the linguistics of about a hun-
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dred languages. Another linguist, the late Ken Hale, who taught at
MIT, specialized in endangered indigenous languages, which he
also learned with great ease. Among his languages we find Navajo,
Jemez, Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa.
Leaving aside these rare people, there are many bilinguals who
are well known not because they master or mastered a large number
of languages, but because of their various other activities. Bilin-
gualism is (or was) just part of their everyday life. In the domain of
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special bilinguals
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II
Bilingual Children
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14
In and Out of Bilingualism
Becoming Bilingual
Children who acquire two languages from the very start (that is, si-
multaneously) continue to intrigue researchers, but they are in fact
far rarer than children who acquire one language and then another
(we will study both cases in the next chapter). To acquire two lan-
guages together, the family usually adopts an approach by which
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
ronment favors the other, there are very rapid shifts in dominance
if the main language changes, and there are even signs that a lan-
guage is forgotten for a while, although it can be revived quickly if
conditions are right. As it happens, Hildegard’s story is also a clas-
sic in the field of bilingualism, as her father, Werner Leopold, pub-
lished one of the first exhaustive case studies on the simultaneous
acquisition of two languages.1 It is based on Hildegard, who is
probably the most studied bilingual child in linguistic history.
164
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in and out of bilingualism
If the second language does not come from one of the parents, it
can come from other caretakers, as my second example shows. Su-
zanne, who now lives in the United States, told me that when she
was an infant in Africa, her nanny spoke Swahili to her. Suzanne
was fluent in that language until age seven, in addition to the
French she spoke with her parents. The family then moved to a
Portuguese-speaking country and her Swahili was replaced by Por-
tuguese. She continues her story below; as the reader will see, jug-
gling languages did not scare this family:
If there are several caretakers and people who matter in the life of
the young child, and if they use different languages, then it is not
uncommon that the child will pick them all up. Here is the testi-
mony of a person who lived in India at the turn of the twentieth
century and who noticed that very young English children acquired
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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in and out of bilingualism
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Reverting to Monolingualism
One often hears about, or reads about, children becoming bilin-
gual, sometimes in a very short time span, and one marvels at how
they do it. One rarely hears the same types of stories about children
who revert back to monolingualism after having been bilingual.
And yet they are just as much a part of our story, even though peo-
ple cherish language acquisition more than language forgetting.
Let me mention two cases. The first one concerns Stephen, the
sixteen-month-old child of anthropologist Robbins Burling, who
accompanied his parents to the Garo Hills district of Assam in In-
dia. Stephen began using Garo words within a few weeks of their
arrival, although his English remained dominant at first. Since he
had a Garo nurse, his Garo improved quickly, in particular when
his mother was hospitalized and he was left mainly in the care of
his nurse. In addition, his father often spoke Garo to him. The fam-
ily traveled to another region of India a bit later on and his English
picked up again, especially because his mother was back. When the
family left the Garo region, Stephen, who was a bit more than
three, was truly bilingual in Garo and English, maybe with a slight
dominance in Garo. He translated and switched from one language
to the other as bilingual children do.8
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in and out of bilingualism
tumbled forth as if all the pent-up speech of those weeks had been
suddenly let loose.” His father did try to speak Garo to Stephen
when they were back in the States, but after a few months he did
not respond to his father’s Garo. Burling did not know if it was a
lack of understanding or a refusal to speak the “wrong” language.
Within six months of their departure from the Garo Hills, Stephen
was having problems with the simplest of Garo words. Robbins
Burling finishes his report in the following way:
sounds familiar and that certain sounds are not difficult to pro-
nounce, but no real studies have managed to give us clear informa-
tion on how much is retained and how quickly the language can be
relearned. All of us who have a childhood language deep inside our
minds have a hidden wish that we will one day be able to reactivate
it and use it in everyday life. As for Stephen, Robbins Burling told
me via e-mail that Stephen never did go back to the Garo Hills.
However, when he was six he acquired Burmese in Rangoon (now
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Yangon). He spoke it quite fluently for a year but then forgot it. As
his father wrote to me, by age eight Stephen had learned three lan-
guages and forgotten two!10
The second example of a child who reverted to monolingualism
is closer to us, geographically and temporally. This case study, re-
lated by linguist Lily Wong Fillmore, concerns Kai Fong, the son of
a Chinese (Cantonese) immigrant family, who arrived in the United
States when he was five. He was raised mainly by his Chinese grand-
mother, as the parents spent long hours in their San Francisco–
area restaurant. When he started going to school, Kai Fong had dif-
ficulties: he was teased by the other boys because of his clothes and
his haircut. After a rock-throwing incident he was involved in, and
the reprimand that followed, he started becoming more withdrawn
both at school and at home. He went through a period when he
knew both Cantonese and English, but quite quickly he switched to
speaking English to his grandmother, who could not understand
him. By age ten, he was spending more time outside the home,
with English-speaking friends, and he no longer seemed to under-
stand Cantonese well. Among his three siblings, only one, a sister,
still communicated in Cantonese with the parents and the grand-
mother. All the adults were disconcerted by this rapid loss of the
family language. Wong Fillmore ends her report as follows:
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in and out of bilingualism
An Explanation
We have seen how children can go in and out of bilingualism in a
very short time. Figure 14.1 outlines the factors that underlie this
phenomenon. In the figure, the main factor leading to the develop-
ment of a language is the need for that language (language X in the
figure). The need can be of various sorts: to communicate with
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Amount of input
Type of input
(oral/written)
LEVEL OF
Role of the family DEVELOPMENT
OF LANGUAGE X
Role of the school
and the community
pretend they don’t), and other factors are unfavorable, then the
child will no longer use the language and there is a fair chance that
it will be forgotten.
Let me go back to the example concerning Hildegard to see how
it fits in with the need factor. She needed to communicate with
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in and out of bilingualism
each of her parents and hence acquired two languages, even though
English became dominant because she lived in the United States.
But when she went to Germany, she needed German more and her
dominance shifted. On her return to the United States, she reverted
to being dominant in English.
How about language forgetting? Clearly Stephen felt he no
longer needed Garo when he left India. He knew that his father, the
only other Garo speaker in the family, also spoke English, and he
didn’t feel, unconsciously of course, that he needed to keep it up
just to please him. Children don’t like pretending when it comes to
something as vital as the language used with a parent. As for Kai
Fong, after a difficult beginning at school, he needed to fit in in his
new country, and he found more solace with his English-speaking
friends than he did at home, and so he let go of his Cantonese, even
though it meant not being able to communicate with some of his
family. The need for English was simply far greater than that for
Cantonese.
In Figure 14.1, the other factors that play a role in the level of
development of a language are listed on the left. Let me go through
them and give some examples. First, children require a certain
amount of input of the language in order to acquire it. Annick
De Houwer, a well-known specialist on childhood bilingualism,
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stresses the fact that for children to “pick up” a language, they need
to have language input in a variety of situations from people who
matter to them—parents, caretakers, members of the extended fam-
ily, friends, and so on.12 Second, the type of input that children re-
ceive is important. Bilingual speech containing code-switches and
borrowings is bound to occur in the family, but if one can find ways
of giving children moments of “monolingual” input, as naturally as
possible, then it is all for the better. Sometimes the monolingual
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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in and out of bilingualism
learn well:
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Clearly, negative attitudes about a language and its culture and the
lack of need for the language, at least when one is young, do not au-
gur well for the child’s acquisition of that language.
As for attitudes toward bilingualism, one is surprised by how lit-
tle people know about it, and by the preconceived ideas they have
concerning what it means. I have presented some of these myths
and discussed them throughout the book. People also have preset
beliefs about children and bilingualism. The following is one such
idea:
Myth: The language spoken in the home will have a negative effect on
the acquisition of the school language, when the latter is different.
fully developed his Spanish when he could have been fluent in both
his languages, in speech and writing. His parents, like many other
parents who “let go of the home language,” then had to explain to
family members why their children could no longer speak it.
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in and out of bilingualism
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15
Acquiring Two Languages
Simultaneous Bilingualism
In this type of bilingualism, children acquire two languages (some-
times even three) at the same time, from the very beginning of lan-
guage onset. Simultaneous bilinguals are far less numerous than
children who acquire their two languages successively (certainly less
than 20 percent of bilingual children).1 Simultaneous bilingualism
occurs when each parent uses a different language with their child
(for example, the father uses Spanish and the mother English) or
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acquiring two languages
languages in much the same manner, and on the same time course,
as infants establishing representations for one language.3 However,
if there are many similar sounds (for example, Spanish and Catalan
between them have three “e” sounds, as in “bet”), then bilingual in-
fants may take a bit more time learning to discriminate them ap-
propriately.4
As for when the first word is spoken, we’ve known for quite some
time that monolingual and bilingual children do not differ; this
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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acquiring two languages
and German words, he stated, and failed to separate the two lan-
guages when speaking to monolingual English or German speak-
ers. He added that it was only at the end of her second year that
there appeared the “first flicker of the later unfolding of two sepa-
rate language systems,” and from then on she slowly began to dis-
tinguish between them.8 The debate that Leopold’s findings evoke
is between two opposite positions: those who say bilingual children
develop a single, unitary language system at the start that then
slowly separates into two systems, and those who believe that bilin-
gual children develop a dual, differentiated system from the very
beginning.
Proponents of the one-system position point to the kind of evi-
dence found by Leopold, such as the fact that bilingual children
may “mix” their languages, sometimes more so in their early years
than later on (we will come back to this point in the next chapter).
There is also the fact that they sometimes use a single rule or device
that can come from one or the other language. Another finding is
that some bilingual children show little overlap in their two vocab-
ularies (that is, a concept is represented by a word in one or the
other language but rarely in both). For example, linguists Virginia
Volterra and Traute Taeschner, who studied the vocabulary devel-
opment of two little German-Italian bilinguals, Lisa and Giulia,
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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acquiring two languages
the context the language is used in, and, most importantly, the lan-
guage spoken by a given person. Anyone who interacts for some
time with a young bilingual child will notice the strong bond that
exists for that child between a person and his or her language (the
person-language bond). In the eyes of the child, a person is associ-
ated with one particular language, and if that person addresses
the child in the other language, the child may refuse to answer or
may be distressed. Here are two examples. Little Luca, bilingual in
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Successive Bilingualism
As we have seen, most children become bilingual in a successive
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manner. That is, they learn one language in the home and then
a second language at school or in the outside community. They
therefore already have a language when they start acquiring the sec-
ond one, and they can use their first language, to some extent at
least (researchers diverge on the extent), in acquiring the new lan-
guage.
Before describing how second-language acquisition takes place
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acquiring two languages
Myth: The earlier a language is acquired, the more fluent a child will
be in it.
One assumption this myth is based on is the idea that young chil-
dren acquire a language more quickly and with less effort than
older children. Another is that the brain is more malleable or “plas-
tic” very early on and hence is more receptive to such tasks as lan-
guage learning. In addition, younger children are said to have fewer
inhibitions, to be less embarrassed when they make mistakes, and
hence to be better learners.
The reality is slightly different and this needs to be underscored.
First, as applied linguist Barry McLaughlin reminds us, children do
not have fewer inhibitions and are not less embarrassed when they
make mistakes; in fact, they may well be shy and self-conscious in
front of their peers.13 Second, it has been shown that young chil-
dren are rather unsophisticated and immature learners in that they
have not yet fully acquired certain cognitive skills—such as the ca-
pacity to abstract, generalize, infer, and classify—that could help
them in second-language acquisition. Third, the notion that there
is a strict, critical period for language learning around the age of
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five years old has been replaced with the notion of a broader “sensi-
tive period” that can extend beyond ten years old and is probably
different for different language skills.
Thus, in a well-known study, researchers Catherine Snow and
Marianne Hoefnagel-Hohle examined the learning of Dutch by
speakers of English in different age groups. They showed that twelve-
to fifteen-year-olds did better than younger learners.14 The only real
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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acquiring two languages
pening in social settings and figure out what people are talking
about and how they do it. They also have to make the speakers
aware of their needs and get them to make accommodations and
adjustments so that they can understand the speakers, and so that
they can acquire the language. In a word, both sides have to cooper-
ate. In her earlier work, Lily Wong Fillmore described three social
strategies used by language learners: (1) join a group and act as if
you understand what is going on, even if you don’t; (2) give the im-
pression, with a few well-chosen words, that you can speak the lan-
guage; and (3) count on your friends for help.17
Here is an example of how ten-year-old Cyril used these strate-
gies. After having gone through several years of monolingualism,
Cyril moved with his parents to the French-speaking part of Swit-
zerland and entered the village school a month after his arrival. Be-
cause he was American (at least culturally) and was fun to be with,
he was an immediate success. However, his French at the start
was nonexistent and his friends’ English was no better. So for a
few weeks he applied Wong Fillmore’s strategies, without knowing
that’s what he was doing, of course. He quickly learned a few set ex-
pressions and used them along with gestures—and a big smile. His
new friends, in turn, did all they could to help him out. One of the
ways they did this was by simplifying their French considerably.
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At the local village fair, for example, kids could “fish” for a pres-
ent that an adult, behind a screen, would put on the hook. One
of the prizes Cyril wanted was a rubber alligator. Knowing this, one
of the French-speaking children said to Cyril in “broken” French:
“Moi avoir alligator, te donner” (literally, “Me get alligator, I give
you”). The sentence he would normally have used with a French-
speaking friend would have been much more complex, of the type,
“Si j’obtiens l’alligator, je te le donnerai.” Cyril understood the sim-
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
plified sentence and all was well (but I don’t believe he ever did get
the alligator).
The second set of processes Lily Wong Fillmore mentions con-
cerns linguistic aspects. Again without being aware that they are
doing it, learners have to obtain from native speakers information
to allow them to discover how the language works and how people
use it. They get this information from the redundant, repetitive,
and regular speech that is spoken to them in context by native
speakers. The learners have to pay close attention to what is being
said and assume a relationship between that and the events around
them. They make educated guesses about what people are saying
and what they are likely to talk about in a given situation. As Wong
Fillmore puts it: “Assume that what people are saying is directly
relevant to the situation at hand or to what they or you are experi-
encing. (Metastrategy: guess).”18 Learners bring to the task their
knowledge of linguistic categories, types of structures (declarative,
interrogative, and so on), and speech acts (direct and indirect), and
hence they can look for their equivalents in the new language.
Finally, cognitive elements form the third set of processes. For
Wong Fillmore these are central, as they result in the acquisition of
the language. Given the contextual input they are obtaining, learn-
ers must discover the units and rules of the language; they must
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acquiring two languages
that learners can be very different from one another. They may
come from different cultural, linguistic, and social groups; they
may be of different ages; they may have different cognitive abilities
(for example, perceptual skills, pattern recognition skills), as well as
different attitudes toward trying new things and taking risks. Some
will indeed actively venture forth, even if they make mistakes, while
others will be more reserved, and sometimes the outcome of the
latter approach may be more successful. Let me cite the example of
two brothers, Cyril, whom we have already met, and Pierre, both
English-speaking boys acquiring French in a natural setting. Cyril
was ten and his brother was five. Whereas Cyril was a very outgoing,
let’s-try-it kind of boy, Pierre was much more reserved and quiet.
Cyril acquired broken French very quickly; he would make pronun-
ciation errors, gender errors, grammatical errors, but he wouldn’t
mind, and he just kept communicating with his friends. Pierre used
a different approach. For about three months he hardly said a word
in French (he even managed to get his teacher to speak basic En-
glish to him), but when he did start to speak French freely, it was
much more error free than Cyril’s French. It was as if Pierre had let
the language settle in, following the path described by Wong Fill-
more, and then, once everything was in place (grammar, pronuncia-
tion, vocabulary), he set about speaking the language. He even had
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the nerve to correct his older brother at times. For example, the lat-
ter said formage one day instead of fromage (cheese), and much to
Cyril’s annoyance, Pierre butted in and said, “C’est fromage, Cyril!”
As an end to this chapter, I would like to stress a very important
aspect of second-language learning that is underlined by many spe-
cialists in the domain, most notably Jim Cummins. Attaining com-
municative abilities in a second language in a natural environment
is only part of the process schoolchildren have to go through, since
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
most times they need to read and write the language as well as
speak it. Conversational fluency (what Cummins calls “basic inter-
personal communicative skills”) is attained quite quickly if the
setting is right and all goes well (for example, both Cyril and
Pierre were fluent in conversational spoken French after a year in
Switzerland). This is true for many young bilinguals and may give
the impression that they have acquired the new language. But aca-
demic language proficiency (what Cummins calls “cognitive aca-
demic language proficiency”) takes much more time and work.20 As
Cummins writes, monolingual children with normal language de-
velopment come to school at age four or five fluent in their home
language; they then spend the next twelve years expanding their lin-
guistic competence in the sphere of literacy (which includes not
only reading and writing but also being able to use language, as
well as viewing, representing, and thinking about ideas critically).
Academic language is complex, Cummins reminds us, because of
the difficulty of the concepts that have to be understood, the un-
common and technical vocabulary that has to be known, and the
sophisticated grammatical constructions that have to be used.
Cummins estimates that second-language learners require some
five years to catch up to their native-language peers in literacy-
related language skills.21 As we will see in Chapter 17, they also need
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16
Linguistic Aspects of
Childhood Bilingualism
Dominance in a Language
Bilingual children often show signs of dominance in a language.
There are several reasons for this, related to whether children ac-
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Usually the influence is not total, as with Stephen, but only partial.
Thus little Anne, an English-French bilingual child whose domi-
nant language was English, would translate the English preposi-
tions that are used with English verbs and add them to French
verbs. She would say, for example, “Je cherche pour le livre” based on
“I’m looking for the book” instead of the grammatically correct “Je
cherche le livre.”4
Language dominance in children acquiring two languages suc-
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
in the appropriate language. When that was not the case, then the
environment was the important factor. In a Spanish environment
(in Mexico or Bolivia, for example) they would use Spanish. In an
English environment (say, the United States) they would use En-
glish—but only if they knew that the person did not speak Spanish.
The telephone, the radio, and the television were all extensions of
the setting for them; thus they showed surprise when they heard a
Spanish voice on the radio in Vermont. If they didn’t know their in-
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linguistic aspects of childhood bilingualism
terlocutor but he or she looked “Latin,” then they would start out
in Spanish but would switch over to English if the other person did
not respond. The person’s level of fluency was also an important
factor—and something they could judge by age four. If Mario and
Carla noticed that the person was using his or her weaker language
to communicate with them, then they would inevitably choose
the other language.5 (Unlike adults, children are not prepared to al-
low a person to practice his or her weaker language with them.)
Fantini’s study, along with others, shows that young bilingual chil-
dren rapidly develop a decision process wherein the interlocutor is
the primary factor for language choice, followed by the situation
and the function of the interaction. Other factors, such as the topic
of interaction, appear later.
Children quickly learn to what extent code-switching behavior is
permissible in an interaction. Psycholinguist Elizabeth Lanza re-
corded a two-year-old Norwegian-English bilingual child (Siri) in-
teracting with her American mother and then her Norwegian fa-
ther, both of whom were bilingual. What is interesting is that the
mother frequently feigned the role of a monolingual and did not
code-switch languages with Siri. The father, on the other hand, ac-
cepted Siri’s language code-switching and responded to it. Lanza
analyzed the interactions between Siri and her parents in terms of
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linguistic aspects of childhood bilingualism
ing, she says, “Ciérrense los ojos. Close your eyes.”8 In sum, children
acquire code-switching skills early on, and they use them when in a
bilingual mode to fill a linguistic need, and also as a communica-
tive strategy.
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
inant and Ban and Tan were English dominant. Oli showed a rela-
tively high rate of French elements in the English he spoke with
his English-speaking mother (English was his weaker language),
whereas Ban and Tan showed the reverse: more English elements
when speaking French to their father (French was their weaker lan-
guage).9
As for successive bilinguals, children who first acquire one lan-
guage and then the other, we have already seen that they will go
through a period of language dominance. They will produce inter-
ferences, and they will insert elements of their stronger language
into their weaker language as a stop-gap measure. But as soon as
they have picked up enough of the second language, they will in-
creasingly speak just that language and will then call on the other
language mainly for communicative reasons, primarily when the
situation is appropriate and they are in a bilingual mode.
Language mode is precisely another factor that accounts for lan-
guage mixing. First, it is not yet clear at what age children start to
control their movement along the monolingual-bilingual contin-
uum as well as their bilingual speech. We saw above that this seems
to take place quite early on, but there may be a short period of ad-
justment when language choice and code-switching mechanisms
are not yet under control. Slippage can take place at this point, and
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linguistic aspects of childhood bilingualism
only language) and Italian (her father’s language; he also spoke the
Abruzzi dialect). When BS and her family moved to Venezuela and
opened a grocery store, BS greeted customers in Spanish, which she
had learned in no time, and could interpret messages from them
to either parent. The family then emigrated to Canada and BS,
who was then eight, added English to her three other languages.
She continued translating and interpreting for her parents: phone
calls, conversations, messages, mail, newspaper articles, and TV
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linguistic aspects of childhood bilingualism
ring theme was the fact that they had to interpret for their parents.
Some had negative memories of this, like Thelma:
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
I tried to tell him that there were just too many, but he
insisted. So, I sat there and pretended to be talking to
someone when it was just the dial tone.14
Many parents do realize the burden they are placing on their bilin-
gual children. Preston tells us about Tom, who one day was an-
gry with his mother for asking him to interpret; she responded by
signing:
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
the French assiette (plate) adapted into Russian with the accusative
marker would give them: “Daj mne asjetu” (Give me a plate). An-
other game consisted in translating idiomatic expressions literally
into the other language and producing them with a straight face.
An example given by Gentilhomme was calling someone “my lit-
tle cabbage” in Russian (a direct translation of “mon petit chou,”
which in French means “my little lamb”).19
Children are quite aware of pronunciation and play with it a lot.
They sometimes make fun of people who speak a language with
an accent by repeating what they said and adding their accent.
Cristina Banfi tells us that little Anabel plays with this aspect of
language; here is an exchange between Anabel and her father, who
is English speaking:
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17
Family Strategies and Support
Family Strategies
I have met many couples who want to start a family and are won-
dering how best to make sure their children are bilingual. The rea-
sons they give for raising bilingual children are many: some want
them to be able to speak both the parents’ languages (for example,
the mother speaks Spanish and the father English); others want
them to be able to communicate with their grandparents; some
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
want to prepare them for the day they will enter school, where a dif-
ferent language is used; and still others want to give them a head
start in languages. Whatever the reason, they are looking for ways
to start their children on the road to bilingualism.
There are five strategies that parents can follow to promote bilingual-
ism in their children. Probably the best-known is the “one person–
one language” strategy, which was made famous in the world of
bilingualism (even though it had probably existed for centuries)
when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jules Ronjat asked
French linguist Maurice Grammont how best to bring up his child
to be bilingual. Ronjat’s wife was German and he was French.
Grammont proposed that each parent should speak his or her lan-
guage exclusively to baby Louis, and that is what they did. Ronjat
later wrote a book on the strategy and stated that Louis had ac-
quired each language just as any native-speaking child would have
done. Recall that little Hildegard, whom we met in Chapter 14, was
raised with the same strategy; her father spoke German to her and
her mother spoke English.
A second strategy is to use one language in the home, usually the
minority language, and the other language outside the home (I will
call this the “home–outside the home” strategy). The idea is that
everyone in the home speaks only one language so that it is ac-
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quired well; as for the other language, it will be acquired when the
child ventures outside the home and, later, when he or she goes to
day care and then enters school. This approach is used—although
not, perhaps, as a conscious strategy—by millions of immigrant
families in which the minority language is spoken in the home, and
sometimes also in the neighborhood, and the majority language is
spoken in the outside society. When parents consciously adopt this
strategy for their children, they usually enforce the home–outside
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family str at egies and support
[My parents] took the position that I would learn all the
English I needed from my playmates and my teachers,
and that only by learning and using Norwegian in the
home could I maintain a fruitful contact with them and
their friends and their culture.1
done on the same day or over several days (perhaps by speaking one
language during the first part of the week, another language dur-
ing the second part).
The fifth strategy, which is a kind of default strategy even though
it is adopted consciously by parents, is to use the two languages in-
terchangeably, letting such factors as topic, person, situation, and
so forth dictate the language to be used. I will call this the “free-
alternation” strategy.
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
will start taking over, much to the distress of the parent who uses
the minority language. Childhood bilingualism expert Annick De
Houwer conducted a large survey covering close to two thousand
families and found that there was a one-in-four chance that chil-
dren would fail to speak the minority language when this strategy
was used.2 In sum, I am not an unconditional supporter of the one
person–one language strategy, as the child may well receive decreas-
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family str at egies and support
ing input from the minority language; this makes the life of the mi-
nority-language parent difficult and can create stress in the family.
The home–outside the home strategy has a few inconveniences
but many advantages. Among the inconveniences is the fact that
one of the parents will probably have to agree to speak his or her
second (or third) language to the child so that everyone is speaking
just one language in the home. Another inconvenience is that, after
a while, the home language—usually the minority language—will
need to be reinforced with input from friends and other family
members, as well as activities in that language, such as playing in
the language and watching TV programs in it. If this reinforcement
can be achieved, then the other, outside-the-home language, which
is usually the majority language, will take care of itself—in day care
and then school, through outside friends, and so on—and the chil-
dren will become bilingual. Parents will then have to work on stabi-
lizing the languages and making sure that a need for them contin-
ues to exist throughout the childhood and adolescent years (see
Chapter 14). In her survey, Annick De Houwer found that if both
parents used the same language in the home, then the success of
transmitting that language, along with the outside language, in-
creased by 20 percent.
What about the one-language-first strategy? This approach is
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
with, or reading to the child) and not from passive activities such as
watching TV or DVDs. To increase exposure to the languages, and
to reduce the load put on parents, it is preferable if members of the
extended family and other caretakers can help, and if the child can
interact with other children who speak the languages.
There is one important aspect that parents have to be careful
about. If at all possible, children must be able to find themselves, at
various times, in a monolingual mode in each of their languages
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family str at egies and support
(see Chapter 4). This means that, unlike in the home, where at least
one parent is bilingual (if not two), children should come into reg-
ular contact with monolingual speakers of each language. There
are two reasons for this. First, children will receive input that does
not contain code-switches and borrowings, those elements of the
other language that often appear when bilinguals speak to one an-
other. Second, it allows children to learn how to navigate along
the monolingual-bilingual language-mode continuum and hence
to adapt their speech to the situation and interlocutor. As we saw in
the previous chapter, children quickly learn when to speak a partic-
ular language in a specific situation and, if the mode is monolin-
gual, to deactivate their other language. In a bilingual home, it is
simply too easy to slip into a bilingual mode: parents bring in
words from the other language and sometimes even change over to
the stronger language to speak to each another or to make sure
they are understood by their children. Children have a tendency to
copy their parents and, little by little, the dominant language in-
creases its presence until it has replaced the minority language. Lin-
guist and speech pathologist Susanne Döpke puts it very well in
imagining how a child might decide to favor one language:
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
being the best friends of their children’s weaker language and hence
of their bilingualism. But they can make up for this by putting
their children in natural situations where they have a real need for
their weaker language.
Family Support
Not only should bilingual children receive support from their fam-
ily if at all possible (recall that I include parents and grandparents
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family str at egies and support
the errors they make. It is here that parents and other caretakers
may be able to explain the situation to bilingual youngsters and
help them meet their new challenge. In addition, a few words with a
teacher can do wonders. Of course, this is easier if parents have
mastered the language themselves and are used to interacting with
the school; if that is not the case, some intermediary who is close to
the family may be able to step in.
Becoming bilingual and bicultural should be a joyful journey
into languages and cultures. When children undertake it, it is im-
portant that they be accompanied, if at all possible, by caring and
informed adults who will ease their passage from one stage to the
next, and with whom they can talk about what they are experienc-
ing. When they have that kind of support, there is every chance
that the bilingualism and biculturalism attained will be a success.
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18
Effects of Bilingualism on Children
I sometimes
receive e-mails or phone calls from
young parents who would like their child to become bilingual but
are worried that there might be harmful consequences. Many have
heard the following:
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effects of bilingualism on children
Some thirty years later, the great linguist Otto Jespersen added:
During the first half of the twentieth century, many studies seemed
to confirm these dire assessments. One such study found that Welsh-
English bilingual children had lower IQ scores than monolingual
children, and that this inferiority became greater with each year
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from age seven to age eleven. Another study found that children
with those same languages (Welsh and English) were outperformed
by monolingual English children in both verbal and nonverbal in-
telligence tests. And a third study revealed that bilingual Italian-
American children were surpassed in measures of mental age by
monolingual English-speaking children.3 In sum, much of the work
done at the time found that bilingualism had a negative effect on
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
Midway through the last century, the tide turned rather sud-
denly and many researchers found that bilingualism was, after all,
a real asset for the child. A major study conducted by Elizabeth
Peal and Wallace Lambert is representative of the research in this
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effects of bilingualism on children
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
have favored bilingual subjects at the time (recall that later re-
sults were in favor of bilinguals). G. MacNab mentions two prob-
lems with the Peal and Lambert study. First, the bilingual students
may have come from families more open to different cultures and
more willing to try new experiences; in addition, they may have
been “sharper” students from the start. The second problem per-
tains to the way students were chosen to be part of the bilingual
group. Peal and Lambert had a very strict criterion: their subjects
had to be balanced bilinguals—that is, equally good in the two lan-
guages. Thus, they filtered out many subjects and kept “the best.” It
is not surprising, therefore, that the group did so well.7
Swain and Cummins themselves pointed out in their 1979 study
that positive findings were usually associated with children who
belonged to the majority-language group and who took part in
language-immersion programs, whereas negative findings were
found with minority-language students whose bilingualism was
not valued and who did not live in a social environment that in-
duced learning.8 When I finished my own review of the literature on
the effects of bilingualism at the beginning of the 1980s for my
book Life with Two Languages, I proposed that bilingualism as such
had no major effect—positive or negative—on the cognitive and in-
tellectual development of children. I cited the applied linguist Barry
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effects of bilingualism on children
away from the word “cat” and puts in its place the first sound of
the word “mop,” to give the word “mat.” In these kinds of tasks,
monolingual children and bilingual children obtain similar results.
The second process, the control of selective attention, is respon-
sible for directing attention to specific aspects of a stimulus or a
mental representation, as we have already seen above. Bialystok tells
us that there is a need for such control when a problem contains a
conflict or an ambiguity. Arriving at the correct solution demands
that children (and adults) attend to one of two possible representa-
tions while they inhibit or resist attention to the other. Here are a
few examples of tasks given to children that involve control of se-
lective attention: counting words in a correct sentence; using a new
(or made-up) name for an object in a sentence (for example, replac-
ing “plane” with “wood” in the sentence “the plane is flying past”);
and judging that a sentence, such as “apples grow on noses,” is syn-
tactically grammatical even though it contains a semantic anomaly.
Ellen Bialystok states that bilingual children do better than their
monolingual counterparts on these types of tasks.14
In addition to these cognitive and metalinguistic tasks, some lin-
guistic tests, notably vocabulary tests, have also been used in stud-
ies comparing bilingual and monolingual children. (Note that other
linguistic aspects of bilingualism, such as language dominance,
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
sequence at all.16
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effects of bilingualism on children
guage development. She stresses that this percentage is the same for
monolingual and bilingual children. The reasons for language de-
lays and language disorders are many, but bilingualism is not one
of them, she stresses. Döpke states that a number of conditions
in the child’s stronger language may signal a language disorder.
Among these, we find the inability to understand familiar words or
to follow instructions appropriate for the child’s age, difficulty
in saying or learning words or phrases, the use of language in a
strange way, a delay in other areas of development, various behav-
ioral problems, and so on. Döpke insists that discontinuing the
home language does not improve the bilingual child’s abilities in
the majority (school) language; on the contrary, it can have other
consequences that can be prejudicial to the child and to his or
her environment. Hence, if a child is being raised bilingual, no
change should be made in the languages used, despite the wide-
spread and erroneous idea, still conveyed by some professionals,
that the child’s language disorder will get better if parents revert to
just one language. As Döpke states clearly,
Not only are bilingual children with language disorders not more
numerous than monolingual children, but their difficulties are of-
ten the same as the latter group’s. Psycholinguist Johanne Paradis
and her colleagues studied the errors made by seven-year-old bilin-
gual and monolingual children with a disorder called specific lan-
guage impairment (SLI) and found the same deficit patterns in the
two groups. Children with SLI have normal social and emotional
development, as well as normal sensory and motor abilities, but
their language abilities are below age expectations. They are intelli-
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
gent and healthy in every way except for the difficulties they have
with language. The study examined the tense errors made by these
children (for example, “The teddy want juice” or “Brendan bake a
cake last night”) and found that the dual language knowledge of
the bilingual children with SLI did not cause them to have different
patterns of errors from those of their monolingual peers with SLI.
The authors concluded that bilingual language learning does not
appear to interfere with the overall course of language acquisi-
tion, even under conditions of impairment.18 In a later publication,
Paradis states that her group’s research finds no empirical support
for advising parents to give up speaking one of their two languages
to a child who has SLI (especially when the child is acquiring two
languages simultaneously).19
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19
Education and Bilingualism
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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education and bilingualism
dren into the mainstream classroom and get them to acquire the
majority language as best they can, without paying attention to, or
using, their first language. Numerous problems accompany this ap-
proach, which some label “submersion” or “sink or swim.” If chil-
dren do not understand or speak the language used in the school,
their learning of skills and content matter is slowed down and they
fall behind. In addition, they often feel lonely and insecure, espe-
cially if they are alone among children who already know the ma-
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
The well-known Mexican American labor leader and civil rights ac-
tivist César Chávez had this to say about his experience:
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education and bilingualism
the children are taught, often in a rather formal way, the language
used as the medium of instruction in the school. Not only is what
is learned not always very useful, despite the considerable efforts of
dedicated teachers, but in addition the children suffer from the
stigma of being pulled out of the regular classroom to attend such
classes, and this widens the gap between them and the other chil-
dren. Here is what a Portuguese-English bilingual once told me
about his experience:
233
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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education and bilingualism
math part twice). He lacked the vocabulary and the grammatical re-
sources in English to make sense of the material he read. Wong Fill-
more poses the question of whether it would have helped if the
tutorial sessions had been conducted in Spanish, Freddy’s first lan-
guage. In his case, it would have helped when he was younger, she
says, but, having been schooled exclusively in English, Freddy no
longer understood or spoke Spanish as well as he did English.
Wong Fillmore concludes that Freddy would have found it easier to
learn what he was supposed to be learning in school had he re-
ceived content instruction in Spanish.8
Acknowledging the importance of instruction in the first lan-
guage, as underlined by the UNESCO objective mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter, some educational bodies have estab-
lished transitional programs during which the student’s first lan-
guage serves as a bridge toward the second, majority language.
These types of programs were common in the United States in the
second part of the twentieth century and exist now in such coun-
tries as The Netherlands, England, and Sweden, according to edu-
cation expert Maria Brisk.9 Students are instructed in their first
language for a limited period, while they are acquiring language
skills in the majority language. As time goes by (programs last any-
where between one and four years, depending on the country), the
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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education and bilingualism
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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education and bilingualism
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
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education and bilingualism
the relation between the two languages and their writing systems.
Facilitation will be greater between Spanish and English, for exam-
ple, than between Chinese and English. But clearly biliteracy is pos-
sible, and it will not hinder the bilingual child.16
Another example of a successful dual-language program is found
in Switzerland, in the bilingual town of Bienne (its French name),
also called Biel (its German name). The high school there offers a
three-year dual-language program leading to the high school de-
gree (or Maturité). The program contains both French-speaking
and Swiss German–speaking students, with about 50 percent of
each per class. Teaching takes place in the teacher’s mother tongue
(French or German) and subjects are taught in the same language
throughout the three years. About half the courses are in German
and the other half in French, so that students are using their first
language half the time and their second language the other half.
Students are regrouped by language only for language courses (for
example, German-speaking students take German literature in Ger-
man). Teachers help the nonnative speakers in their courses by
translating from time to time and by making sure that the subject
matter is understood. When marking papers, they are not exces-
sively strict when students make errors in their weaker language.
Students who follow a subject in their native language are coached
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b i l i n g u a l c h i l d r e n
the Swiss Germans to improve their French and the Swiss French
students to do the same with German as well as Swiss German (the
everyday language used in the German part of Switzerland).
The Amigos and the Biel/Bienne programs are exceptions, un-
fortunately. According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, in
Washington, D.C., there were some 332 dual-language bilingual pro-
grams of this type in elementary schools in the United States in
2008, which represents only about 1 percent of all programs. But,
just like the early immersion programs, they are establishing a
model for what can be done to help students acquire two lan-
guages, discover the culture of the other language group, interact
with speakers of that language and culture, and have a better un-
derstanding of what it means to be able to help someone else who
does not understand what is being said and to be helped by some-
one when you are in the same situation. For all of those who have
lived through the sink or swim approach in education (I was one of
those children), these kinds of programs are extremely promising.
They reconcile education and bilingualism and benefit all those
concerned, whether they come from the dominant culture or from
a minority culture.17
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Conclusion
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c o n c l u s i o n
was simply not accepted then. When I look around today and see so
many bilingual and bicultural people, some in quite visible public
positions, still hesitant to acknowledge publicly their other lan-
guage and culture, I realize that we are not there yet, at least in
some parts of the world.
Finally, the myth that bilingualism has negative effects on the
development of children reminds me of Einar Haugen, the fore-
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c o n c l u s i o n
Interested readers can contact the author by means of his Web site:
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
www.francoisgrosjean.ch.
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Notes
247
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 – 2 6
2. describing bilinguals
1. Nancy Huston, Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self (To-
ronto: McArthur, 2002), 40.
2. Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1933), 56.
3. Christophe Thiery, “True Bilingualism and Second Language
Learning,” in David Gerver and H. Wallace Sinaiko, eds., Language
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
248
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 8 – 3 7
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 1 – 5 5
250
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 6 – 6 4
15. Ibid.
16. As quoted in Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Lan-
guage (New York: Appleton-Century, 1923), 94.
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 5 – 7 4
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 4 – 8 3
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 4 – 9 8
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 8 – 1 0 9
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 0 – 1 2 0
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 1 – 1 2 8
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 9 – 1 3 9
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 3
Press, 2004), 5.
15. In addition to the authors mentioned already, several others have
written, or write, in their two or more languages, including: André
Brink (Afrikaans, English), Ariel Dorfman (Spanish, English),
Claude Esteban (Spanish, French), Romain Gary (French, English),
Julien Green (French, English), Milan Kundera (Czech, French),
Jonathan Littell (English, French), John Milton (Latin, Greek, Ital-
ian, English). My thanks to Elizabeth Beaujour for supplying
much of this information, and also to John K. Hale for the infor-
259
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 3 – 1 9 0
12. Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, The Bilingual Child: Early Devel-
opment and Language Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
13. Barry McLaughlin, Myths and Misconceptions about Second Language
Learning: What Every Teacher Needs to Unlearn (Washington, D.C.:
Center for Applied Linguistics, 1993).
14. Catherine Snow and Marianne Hoefnagel-Hohle, “The Critical Pe-
riod for Language Acquisition: Evidence from Second Language
Learning,” Child Development 49 (1978): 1114–1128.
15. Note that many of these factors also hold for adults, with the ex-
ception of school, of course, and family to some extent. It is clear
that additional aspects also play a role where adults are con-
cerned.
16. Lily Wong Fillmore, “Second-Language Learning in Children: A
Model of Language Learning in Context,” in Ellen Bialystok, ed.,
Language Processing in Bilingual Children (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 49–69.
17. Lily Wong Fillmore, “The Second Time Around: Cognitive and So-
cial Strategies in Second-Language Acquisition,” Ph.D. diss., Stan-
ford University, 1976.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Jim Cummins, “BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status
of the Distinction,” in Brian Street and Nancy Hornberger, eds.,
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n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 0 0 – 2 1 1
11. Ibid.
12. François Grosjean, Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilin-
gualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 201.
13. Paul Preston, Mother Father Deaf (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 86.
14. Ibid., 145.
15. Ibid., 165.
16. Marguerite Malakoff and Kenji Hakuta, “Translation Skill and
Metalinguistic Awareness in Bilinguals,” in Ellen Bialystok, ed.,
Language Processing in Bilingual Children (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 141–166.
17. Guadalupe Valdés, Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of
Young Interpreters from Immigrant Communities (Mahwah, N.J.: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 2003).
18. Fantini, “Bilingual Behavior and Social Cues.”
19. Yves Gentilhomme, “Expérience autobiographique d’un sujet
bilingue Russe-Français: Prolégomènes théoriques,” paper pre-
sented at the Third International Conference on Languages in
Contact, Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, 1980.
20. Banfi, “Translation and the Bilingual Child.”
265
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Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
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Index
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i n d e x
integration of, 59; nonce borrowing, phonetics and prosody of, 57; com-
59; examples of, 59–60, 62; loan shift, pared to borrowing, 58; in a monolin-
59–60; and complementarity principle, gual mode, 66–68; and language for-
60; reasons for, 60–61; spontaneous getting, 91; unintentional, 132–133; in
borrowing, 61; established borrowing, children, 195–197
61–62; opposition to, 61–62; and lan- Complementarity principle: description
guage forgetting, 91 of, 29–31; and fluency, 31–32, 103; evi-
Bossard, James, 81 dence for, 32–33; and well-learned be-
Brain, bilingual. See Neurolinguistics of haviors, 33–34; and language domi-
bilingualism nance, 34–36; and translation, 36–37,
Breton, André, 103 149; and memory, 37–38; and language
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i n d e x
choice, 46; and code-switching, 54, 67; 223–226; control of attention, 223–224,
and borrowing, 60; and bilinguals’ 225; metalinguistic tasks, 224; vocabu-
language history, 89; and thinking, lary tests, 225–226
127–128; and dreaming, 128–129; and bi- Elderly bilinguals, 93–96
lingual writers, 140; and children, 226; Emotions in bilinguals, 129–133
and vocabulary tests, 226 Erasmus, Desiderius, 157
Conrad, Joseph, 76, 77–78, 136–137 Ervin (-Tripp), Susan, 123–124, 125
Cook, Vivian, 75
Culture, characteristics of, 108–109
Culture shock, 111, 216 Family, role of, 135, 163, 171–174, 176, 186
Cummins, Jim, 189–190, 221, 222, 232, Family strategies, 205–212
233–234 Family support, 212–217
Fantini, Alvino, 194–195, 203
Feelings about bilingualism. See Atti-
Deaf bilinguals, 13 tudes
De Houwer, Annick, 173, 174, 182, 208, Feng, Xiaojia, 225–226
209 Fernandez, Sylvia, 180
Dementia, 96 Fillmore, Lily Wong, 170–171, 186–189,
Deviations, intralanguage, 69 234–235
Díaz, Junot, 142 Fluency. See Language fluency
Diglossia, 30–31 Foreign accent. See Accent
Di Pietro, Robert, 122 Fort Defiance, Arizona, 238
Discrimination toward immigrants, 106 Functions of languages, 26–27, 28–38. See
Divergent thinking, 99 also Complementarity principle
Dominance. See Language dominance
Döpke, Susanne, 211, 226–227
Dorfman, Ariel, 139 Gallagher, Charles, 123
Dreaming and bilingualism, 128–129 Galloway, Linda, 90–91
Genesee, Fred, 182, 197
Green, David, 65–66
Education, 229–242; as a cause of bilin-
Copyright © 2010. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
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i n d e x
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i n d e x
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i n d e x
276
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