Bilingualism In George Yule's The Study Of Language

According to George Yule, in his book The Study of Language, regional variation is not only a matter of two or more dialects of a single language, but it can also involve two or more different languages within the same country. The author takes Canada as an example of a bilingual country, where both French and English are official languages. Yule mentions that Canada is essentially an “English-speaking country, with a French-speaking minority group”, which needs to learn English in order to participate in the larger dominant linguistic community. This state of knowing two distinct languages is known as bilingualism. However, bilingualism can also be the result of children who are born of parents who speak different languages. It is the aim …show more content…
Bernand Spolsky, in his book Sociolinguistics, describes the factors that make up an individual’s bilingualism. These have to do with the identification of each of the languages involved; the way each language was acquired; skills proficiency level in both languages; internal functions, such as counting or dreaming; external functions, such as carrying out an informal conversation or giving a lecture; and domains. The latest notion is relevant to the concept of bilingualism because a bilingual may have a preferred language according to each of the domains – a location, a set of relationships or a set of topics. According to Spolsky, bilinguals possess a collection of domain-related rules of language choice that enables them to switch the language to signal either a change of role-relation or topic while still being in the same location. This idea of switching between two languages is referred as to code-switching, that is to say, a change by a speaker from one language or language variety to the other, which can take place during a conversation or within sentences depending on the social context. This process of shifting between languages permits linguistic minorities to maintain a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a larger community. Code-switching may often be a subconscious process as people may not always be aware that they …show more content…
In a mixed nationality marriage, the child simultaneously acquires the language spoken by her mother and the language spoken by her father. By means of this systematic strategy, children can acquire two languages from birth at the same time even though one language may be more dominant than the other. They may usually employ one language at home and the other one may be spoken at school or in the community. In general, all bilingual children grow up to perform in their dominant language , which is the medium of instruction at school. Spolsky mentions that children growing up bilingually not only manage to keep the two languages separate, but they also learn which language to use to which person. In fact, the phenomenon of code-switching demonstrates that every time children alternate between the two languages, they are clearly keeping their languages apart. These children are expected to develop a mixed code for many reasons. One of the main causes has to do with the fact that they may strategically code-switch when they need to fill a linguistic need because they do not know a word in one language, such as “rica food”, or there is no direct translation. They may also switch between languages in order to have stronger bonds with their family or their friends. For instance, a bilingual child who knows English and Spanish may be able to bond with his grandparents