Bilingualism in Childhood

Project Report from the year 2009 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1, Syddansk Universitet (Syddansk Universitet, Sønderborg), language: English, abstract: A lot of people in the world are bilingual. People in Africa and Asia often speak their

community language and additionally an official language like English or French. It is

not a big surprise when calling in mind that according to Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath

of the Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig there are about

6500-7000 languages in the world and according to www.welt-in-zahlen.de 193

countries. That makes an average of 35 languages per country.

Despite the fact that bilingualism is widespread, there are a lot of negative

opinions in the mind of people. People say for example ¿Your kid is going to get all

these languages mixed up.¿, ¿when will she (or he) use that (language)¿ (both cf.

Bosemark, 2006b, my italics) or that bilingual children are overstrained and that they

start later to talk than their monolingual peers (cf. Leist-Villis, 2008).

Within this research-paper I will deal with bilingualism in childhood. More

precisely I will answer the research question ¿What are the reasons for parents to

raise their child bilingually¿. First I will define the term bilingualism. For that I quote a

few definitions of bilingualism from experts and afterwards I will define the one I will

work with. Afterwards I will introduce some successful methods applied by parents

and I will point out the advantages and disadvantages of the methods I found in

literature. I will continue explaining the research I have done on the topic followed by

the analysis of my data. Concluding I will answer the research question and give a

prospective view on possible future research.

Bilingualism is a huge topic and to look on it more deeply I decided to consider

families who raised their children English-German or German-English. To get in

contact with families bringing up their children in that way, I wrote articles in internet

communities and designed a questionnaire that I sent to several families raising their

child/ren bilingually who answered my requests. In addition to the internet and my

questionnaire I considered books that deal with the topic.