Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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For the last 40 years or so, I have defined bilinguals as those who use two or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives. Putting the emphasis on language use does not do away with language proficiency though, since you cannot use a language if you do not know it to some extent. But the range of who can be considered bilingual increases considerably with this definition. As I wrote in Bilingual: Life and Reality (Grosjean 2010), at one end of the range we find the migrant worker who may speak with some difficulty the host country’s language and who does not read and write it. At the other end, we have the professional interpreter who is fully fluent in two languages. In between, we find the scientist who reads and writes articles in a second language but who rarely speaks it, the foreign-born spouse who interacts with friends in his first language, the member of a linguistic minority who uses the minority language only at home and the majority language in all other domains of life, the Deaf person who uses sign language with her friends but a spoken language (often in its written form) with a hearing person, and so on. Despite the great diversity among these people, they all share a common feature: They lead their lives with two or more languages.