Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн
19 страница из 69
What Language Scientists Say
Do language scientists have a different view of what it means to be bilingual? Some have indeed put the emphasis on language fluency (which they also term language proficiency or language knowledge), but over the years we have seen a gradual movement away from the very restrictive definition proposed by Bloomfield (1933) who stated that bilingualism is the “native-like control of two languages.” This stance was still present with Thiery (1978) who wrote that “a true bilingual is someone who is taken to be one of themselves by the members of two different linguistic communities, at roughly the same social and cultural level.” Movement away from this position can already be seen with Hakuta (1992) who simply talks of control of languages: “a bilingual individual is someone who controls two or more languages.” At the time, Haugen (1969) was one of the rare exceptions who stated that fluency did not need to be that high. He stated that bilingualism begins “at the point where the speaker of one language can produce complete, meaningful utterances in the other language.”