Speaking Two Languages

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who speak more than one language? And if they do not, how can we explain the difficulties second language learners experience in mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.

This book is designed for the medievalist interested in contemporary criticism but cautious about its limits. The volume's essays are not designed to offer rereadings of familiar texts, but to address the problems of articulating tradition and contemporary theory. Each contributor interprets critical methods as consciously chosen and spoken "languages," and explores the consequences of combining a traditional and a contemporary method, and hence, speaking two languages. Each essay includes a critical bibliographical note pointing to further reading in the languages it employs.

This book fills a critical gap in the cross-cultural literature by illuminating the bilingual experience in both its social and clinical contexts. Rafael Javier makes a convincing, empirically founded case for what he terms the bilingual mind, with its own particular approach to cognition, memory, and emotional and social development. Using this framework, he provides answers to important questions about the way bilingualism affects cognition and development.

This updated and revised edition of Hamers and Blanc's successful textbook presents state-of-the-art knowledge about languages in contact from individual bilingualism (or bilinguality) to societal bilingualism. It is both multi- and interdisciplinary in approach, and analyses bilingualism at individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Linguistic, cognitive and sociocultural aspects of bilingual development are explored, as are problems such as bilingual memory and polyglot aphasia. Hamers and Blanc analyse the relationship between culture, identity, and language behaviour in multicultural settings, as well as the communication strategies in interpersonal and intergroup relations. They also propose theoretical models of language processing and development, which are then applied to bilingual behaviour. Other topics reviewed include language shift, pidgins and creoles, language planning and bilingual education. This book will be invaluable to students, teachers and scholars interested in languages in contact in a range of disciplines including psycholinguistics, linguistics, the social sciences, education and language planning.

'Bringing up a Bilingual Child' is aimed at (existing or soon-to-be) parents in families where more than one language is spoken, as well as anyone in the extended circle of family and friend of such multilingual families, as well as for anyone coming into contact with them. The aim of the book is to help multilingual families to create a supportive environment for children in which they naturally grow up to speak more than one language. The intention is to give you an easy-to-read-and-use guide to multilingual parenting, providing motivation, ideas, advice and answers to any questions parents may have.

Many people consider bilinguals to be exceptional, yet almost half the world's population speaks more than one language. Bilingualism is found in every country of the world, in every class of society, in all age groups. Life with Two Languages is the first book to provide a complete and authoritative look at the nature of the bilingual experience. Fran ois Grosjean, himself a bilingual, covers the topic from each of its many angles in order to provide a balanced introduction to this fascinating phenomenon. Grosjean discusses the political and social situations that arise when languages come into contact and the policies nations have established toward their linguistic minorities in the domains of education and governance. Of particular interest is his detailed account of the psychological and social factors that lead a bilingual to choose one of her languages when speaking to another bilingual or to use both languages in the fascinating phenomenon of code-switching. The author explains how children become bilingual as quickly as they become monolingual, describes the organization of languages in the bilingual brain, and examines the legacy of bilingualism on language, as exemplified in word borrowings. Above all, Life with Two Languages puts the emphasis on the bilingual person. In a series of first-hand reports scattered throughout the book, bilinguals tell what it is like to live with two languages and describe the educational and social experiences they have undergone. Written in a clear and informative style, Life with Two Languages will appeal to professionals and students in linguistics, education, sociology, and psychology, as well as to the more casually curious.

The lives of many families involve contact with more than one language and culture on a daily basis. Growing Up with Two Languages is aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best way to go about helping children gain maximum benefit from the multilingual situation. This best-selling guide is illustrated by glimpses of life from interviews with fifty families from all around the world. The trials and rewards of life with two languages and cultures are discussed in detail, and followed by practical advice on how to support the child’s linguistic development. Features of this third edition include: a dedicated website with new and updated Internet resources a new chapter giving the perspective of adults who have themselves grown up with more than one language a new chapter presenting research into bilingual language acquisition with information about further reading new and updated first-hand advice and examples throughout. Una Cunningham is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Stockholm University, Sweden. She and her husband, Staffan Andersson, have raised their four children to speak English and Swedish in Sweden.

Code-switching - the alternating use of several languages by bilingual speakers - does not usually indicate lack of competence on the part of the speaker in any of the languages concerned, but results from complex bilingual skills. The reasons why people switch their codes are as varied as the directions from which linguists approach this issue, and raise many sociological, psychological, and grammatical questions. This volume of essays by leading scholars brings together the main strands of current research in four major areas: the policy implications of code-switching in specific institutional and community settings; the perspective of social theory on code-switching as a form of speech behaviour in particular social contexts; the grammatical analysis of code-switching, including the factors that constrain switching even within a sentence; and the implications of code-switching in bilingual processing and development.

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

Bilingualism Across the Lifespan examines the dynamics of bilingual language processing over time from the perspectives of neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. This multidisciplinary approach is fundamental to an understanding of how the bilingual's two (or more) language systems interact with each other and with other higher cognitive systems, neurological substrates, and social systems - a central theme of this volume. Contributors examine the nature of bilingualism during various phases of the lifecycle - childhood, adulthood, and old age - and in various health/pathology conditions. Topics range from code separation in the young bilingual child, across various types of language pathologies in adult bilinguals, to language choice problems in dementia. The volume thus offers a broad overview of current theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of bilingualism. It will interest and stimulate researchers and graduate students in the fields of linguistics, neuropsychology, and developmental psychology, as well as in foreign language teaching, speech pathology, educational psychology, and special education.