Sociolinguistic

Bilingualism

By Paweł Zieliński

The aim of this article is to present a short compendium of theories concerning bilingualism and bilinguals. Firstly, one needs to provide a clear definition of a bilingual. The most common, or rather a layman one would claim that a bilingual is a person with a command of two languages. A person who can speak and understand more than two languages is called a multilingual. However, in this day and age most people have some command of two or more languages. They are able, for instance, to read a simple text, or a newspaper article in a second language (L2). A question has to be put forth: what command of a second language could guarantee labeling someone as bilingual; does an L1 speaker have the possibility to master an L2 language, or is it just possible when a child is exposed to two languages from the start? Finally, should we only consider language comprehension i.e. grammar, vocabulary etc, or is being aware of certain cultural nuisances in L2 of equal importance.

These are all difficult questions to a . After over 20 years of learning English I can say that I have mastered some of it. There are some areas (especially those concerning my studies) where my English surpasses my Polish, there are other areas where this does not happen. However, if I were to write an English comprehension test, I'd probably score high.

One can classify bilinguals in two groups. Spolsky wrote on bilingualism in Sociolinguistics (1998) (...) compound bilinguals whose two language were assumed to be closely connected, because one language had been learned after another. (Spolsky 1998:48). A different term used in opposite to compound is co-ordinate. Co-ordinate bilinguals, again from Spolsky, are supposed to have learned the two languages separately (48). Thus L1 and L2 are treated by that person as two different entities. (Spolsky 1998:48). What can be considered controversial about this is how much can a distinction be made between the two concepts. The two ideas are treated in opposite of one another, so if a co-ordinate bilingual knows two separate language systems and, for example, the English table and Polish stół are two different entities, the compound bilingual must posses a system with changeable variants where the words mentioned in the example are basically the same thing. Does one type of bilingual have separate 'drawers' for every word and object, and the other has everything blended? Finally, how could we distinguish between the two, and is the division really necessary?

There are also some pragmatic issues worth discussing. Firstly, as posed in the first paragraph, does a person need to be exposed.