Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingualism: A Very Brief Overview 235gracias or guten Tag or tovarisch or even if you only understand them you clearly have some ‘command’ of a foreign tongue. Of course, thissort of competence does not lead many to think of bilingualism. If, on theother hand, you are conversationally fluent in more than one language,then bilingualism may be an apt designation. And if, on the third hand,you are like the literary critic and essayist, George Steiner, who claimsequal fluency in English, French and German, then bilingualism (actuallytrilingualism in this case) seems apter still.Giuseppe Mezzofanti, chief curator in the Vatican Library in the early19th century, was reportedly fluent in 60 languages and had translatingability in twice that number. Georges Schmidt, head of the terminologysection at the United Nations in the 1960s, knew 20 languages. GeorgeSteiner and all the other well-known polyglots the Stoppards,Kunderas and Nabokovs of the world typically have three or fourlanguages (and so, of course, do many hundreds of millions ofunremarked and unremarkable people). Even more common arebilinguals, with a paltry dual fluency. And then there is your cousin inBirmingham, who can just about understand what c’est la vie means.How are these fluencies related? Mezzofanti would seem to be moremultilingual than Steiner, but the latter claims that his varieties are soequally deeply held that, even after rigorous self-examination of whichlanguage emerges spontaneously in times of emergency or elevatedemotion, which variety is dreamt in, which is associated with the earliestmemories no one of the three seems dominant. (Steiner and others haveargued, in fact, that there may be important linguistic and cognitivedifferences between a person who has a clear and obvious first language,to which others have been added, and someone like himself, who isapparently maternally multilingual. Wierzbicka’s [2005] perceptivepaper on the different perspectives of mono- and multilingual peopleis relevant here.) And if there is some difficulty in comparing capabilities,given that both number and depth seem to be important, where mightwe place the Schmidts of the world? And your Birmingham cousin:ought she to count as bilingual at all? Beyond the informal interest thathas always attached to polymathic capabilities, beyond the Guinness Bookof Records, the assessment of linguistic competence has considerablescholarly importance.As may be imagined, it is easy to find definitions of bilingualism thatreflect widely divergent responses to the question of degree. In 1933, forexample, Bloomfield observed that bilingualism resulted from theaddition of a perfectly learned foreign language to one’s own, undiminishednative tongue. He did rather confuse the issue, however, by