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BILINGUALISMBY

DR. SHAHZAD UL HASSAN

FAROOQI COURSE OUTLINE AND

DEFINITION

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COURSE PLAN (OUTLINE)

What is bilingualism, its types and historical background of Bilingualism

Reasons/Causes of Bilingualism Language Contact & Consequences –

borrowing, indigenization etc. Language Choices (Diglossia;

Polyglossia; Code-Switching) Bilingual Education. Language change and linguistic

imperialism

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STUDENTS’ PRESENTATIONS TOPICS Bilingual language behavior (code-

switching, language choice), Bilingualism and cognition, Poverty, hunger and language learning, Foreign language education/teaching, Special education and Bilingualism, Teaching English to Arabic speaking vs

Urdu speaking

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DEFINITION/S OF BILINGUALISM Monolingual is a person with one language. But

surprisingly there are less people who are monolingual in the world and more who are bilingual, trilingual, multilingual or polyglot.

Multilingualism / Polyglotism is the ability to speak several languages with a high degree of proficiency.

Bilingualism: The ability to speak two languages (Merriam Webster) Bilingualism is simply about two languages. (Baker 2001)

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Individual bilingualism Societal bilingualism Coordinate bilingualism Subordinate bilingualism Elective bilingualism Circumstantial bilingualism Maximal bilingualism Incipient bilingualism Balanced bilingualism Semi bilingualism

TYPES OF BILINGUALISM

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Individual Bilingualism: an individual characteristic

Social Bilingualism: a characteristic of social group, community, region or country. Roughly speaking, societal bilingualism occurs when in a given society two or more languages are spoken. Nearly all societies are bilingual with varying degree or form of bilingualism.

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Coordinate and Subordinate Bilingualism Most people who are native bilinguals, meaning that they grew up

learning both languages at the same time, are coordinate bilinguals. These people know the two languages equally well and can use them for any situation. They recognize a thing....let's say an apple....as a single concept....but two different words, both equally easy to use when the situation arises. Therefore....for an Urdu coordinate bilingual:

Aap Ka Shukria = Thank you

The situation is slightly different for a subordinate bilingual. They may not have learned their two languages equally, or may have attained their bilingualism later in life. As a result, they often use their primary language to subordinate the second language. For the subordinate bilingual:

Aap Ka Shukria --> Thank you. But when first language is over powering and imposes its structure on second one then sentences like this appear.......................Thank to you

They think “Aap Ka Shukria” and then transfer that to “Thank you" in the appropriate situation.

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Elective bilingualism is a characteristic of individuals who choose to learn a language, for example in the classroom. Elective bilinguals come from majority language groups (e.g. English-speaking Americans who learn Spanish or French). They add a second-language without losing their first language.

Circumstantial bilinguals learn another language to survive. Because of their circumstances (e.g. as immigrants), they need another language to function effectively (for example, Latinos in the United States). Consequently, their first language is in danger of being replaced by the second language. Their first language is insufficient to meet the educational, political and employment demands and communicative needs of the society in which they are placed. Circumstantial bilinguals are groups of individuals who must become bilingual to operate in the majority language society that surrounds them.

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WHO IS A BILINGUAL? Maximal, Minimal and Balanced Approach Maximal: According to Bloomfield, a bilingual should possess 'native·like control of two or more languages' (1933: 56).

Minimal: Macnamara (1969) proposed that somebody should be called bilingual if he has some second-language skills in one of the four modalities (speaking, listening, writing, reading), in addition to his first language skills.

Incipient: Diebold (1964) presented concept of incipient bilingual. The term incipient bilingualism allows people with minimal competence in a second language to squeeze into the bilingual category. Tourists with a few phrases and business people with a few greetings in a second language would be incipient bilinguals.

Balanced: This bilingualism is sometimes used as an idealized concept. Fishman(1971) has argued that rarely will anyone be equally competent across all situations.Most bilinguals will use their two languages for different purposes and withdifferent people. For example, a person may use one language at work; the otherlanguage at home and in the local community.

A ‘semilingual’ is considered to exhibit the following profile in both theirlanguages: displays a small vocabulary and incorrect grammar, consciously thinksabout language production, is stilted and uncreative with each language, and findsit difficult to think and express emotions in either language.

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WHY TO STUDY BILINGUALISM A thorough and dispassionate analysis of bilingual language behaviour will help us to gain insight into the language problems of groups and individuals and thus support language planning and educational policies.

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Comparative and historical tradition of the nineteenth century. William Dwight Whitney (1881) explicitly discusses the role of borrowing in language change.

Hugo Schuchardt documented a number of complex situations of language contact in publications from 1880 onward, and was the founder of modern creole language studies.

In the wake of Schuchardt's work a number of other creolists, including Hesseling (e.g. 1899, 1905) and Turner (1949) have continued to develop the linguistic study of language-contact phenomena.

Finally, work that can be viewed as presenting the first truly comprehensive view of language contact dates from the early 19505, including both Weinreich's seminal

Languages in Contact(1953) and Haugen's detailed study, The Norwegian Language In America (1953).

Marcel Cohen's work in France, who started Out as an Arabism and whose work gradually came to include a strong concern for language-contact phenomena

HISTORY OF BILINGUALISM

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An early and influential study, by Weinreich (1953), took a descriptive, almost taxonomic approach.

Drawing on empirical data from a bilingual community in Switzerland, Weinreich sought to classify types of bilingual forms, and hence types of bilingualism.

His central concerns were to what extent one or more grammars could be said to be

involved how aspects of one grammar might influence another,

and what kinds of conditions (mainly social, but also psychological) might explain why things look one way or another.

In some sense, Weinreich’s approach was an extension of descriptive linguistic methods to the phenomenon of bilingualism, which sought simultaneously: to discern universal patterns of linguistic order to discover the links among language, cognition and society.

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Weinreich was among the first to examine bilingualism in terms of a related set of forms and functions, in an attempt to describe the different linguistic manifestations of bilingualism as they might relate to different structural and functional distributions of linguistic varieties in a community.

Mackey’s work on typologies of bilingualism followed in this vein. Both were concerned with what might be termed a “languages in contact” approach, in which the focus remained on relations between or among linguistic systems, albeit in connection with their social distribution.

Ferguson’s concept of diglossia famously pointed to the ways in whicheven different varieties of one language could be assigned different functions within a hierarchy of prestige and status, with the “high” language conventionally involving more institutionalized functions connected to the distribution and definition of valued resources, and the “low” language connected to everyday life and relations of solidarity among marginalized segments of the population.

The concept seemed applicable to situations where the linguistic varieties were conventionally thought of as different languagesaltogether.

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nineteenth-century nationalism posited the naturalness and desirability of the existence of nations understood as organic and culturally and linguistically homogeneous units (Hobsbawm 1990).

Bilingualism was considered as a potential problem for the maintenance or reproduction of such nations, or as a threat to their boundaries.

POLITICAL ASPECT OF BILINGUALISM

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France at the time of the Revolution was debating how best to construct a unified France in which all could equally benefit from the values of the Revolution, that is, through bringing the message to the people through their own language varieties (whether Breton or Gascon, Picard or Occitan) or byassuring that everyone spoke the same language (Grillo 1989; Higonnet 1980).

The result of the debate was the promotion of monolingualism in the name of libert´e, ´egalit´e et fraternit´e.

This was institutionalized, largely through education and the military, and decades and even centuries of work were undertaken to establish the homogeneity which was only ever partially realized on the ground

Similar struggles, each with its own specificities,could be found across Western Europe around the same period and exported to the colonies.

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This monolingual norm, associated with ideologies of the nation, and eventually of the nation-State, has been the dominant one influencing studies of bilingualism.

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RECOMMENDED BOOKS FOR BILINGUALISM Foundations of Bilingual Education and

Bilingualism, Colin Baker, Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman Bilingualism and Bilinguality, Hamers &

Blanc Mesthrie, R.S. (2009). Introducing

sociolinguistics.(2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.