Bilingualism and Cognition

Globalization increases population movements, which has resulted in a growing number of multicultural societies. Often, mixed communities lead to multilingual families and children who identify themselves as belonging to more than one culture. Bilingualism is a ¿language phenomenon that indicates that an individual functions, in varying degrees of competence, in at least two languages. However, we often assume that bilingualism only indicates linguistic phenomenon and ignore its non-linguistic dimensions, namely the psychological and sociocultural aspects. Our purpose for writing this paper is to unravel the different aspects of bilingualism, and the implications of these aspects towards bilingual speakers.