What is Bilingualism? Effects of early and late bilingualism on the human brain (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,00, University of Kassel (Fachbereich für Sprachwissenschaften), course: Visualization and Classroom Observation, language: English, abstract: In this paper a definition of the term bilingualism will be attempted, whereas different points of views, e.g. the sociolinguistic and the psycholinguistic point of view, will be implemented. What is more, a closer look at the implementation of languages in the human brain will be analyzed, in order to understand why bilingualism as well as early bilingual teaching have a deep impact on children's and student's language development.

The question "what is bilingualism?" is not easy to answer. Even if we study the great canon of literature on bilingualism, it leads to the conclusion that there aren't any common definitions to be found. Linguists have only agreed on the point that bilingualism refers to an individual that has language skills in two languages. However, linguists set the degree of bilingualism differently: on the one hand, rudimentary knowledge about a language seems enough, whereas on the other hand, in order to be regarded as a bilingual, a speaker is supposed to have sophisticated knowledge about both languages, similar to the language level of a monolingual (Baker, 2006, p. 15).

This statement forces a variety of further questions to arouse such as "what does it mean to be able to speak two languages? In how far do the languages have to be developed and sophisticated in order to call an individual a bilingual speaker? What kind of criteria have to be fulfilled?

As mentioned before, linguists are not in an agreement about the definition of the term bilingualism. The reason might be the great variety within the scope of science that deals with this very phenomenon of bilingualism. Besides the field of linguistics psychology, sociology and pedagogic are fields that show great interest in bilingualism as well. Psychology deals with the phenomenon of bilingualism concerning mental processes, sociology deals with cultural aspects in close contact with the society, and pedagogic is concerned with bilingualism occurring in school life, respectively in school and lesson planning.

Further, bilingualism or multilingualism is analyzed in all disciplines in two different levels; first, the individual level and the social level. Humans live in a society in which they communicate with each other, express their feelings, thoughts and attitudes. Humans are beings that think about their impressions of the world and clothe their thoughts in words.