Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingualism: A Very Brief Overview 243(and experience) has shown that bilingualism does not lead to decreasedor weakened capacities. Most people in the world are bilingual or better,and while some are well-educated and socioeconomically secure thesocial circumstances of the majority are modest. It would seem illogicalto believe, then, that bilingualism per se is likely to involve anysignificant increase in basic cognitive and intellectual skills. It wouldsurely be perverse, however, to deny that bilingualism can representanother dimension of ability and, in that sense, represent a repertoireexpansion. I see nothing controversial about this, just as I would seenothing controversial in the statement that a number of years’ devotionto the study of great literature can lead to a heightened or, at least, alteredsensitivity to the human condition.Bilingualism and IdentityBeing ‘maternally’ or ‘simultaneously’ bilingual from the earliest age,learning another language (whether in an ‘additive’ or a ‘subtractive’context) through force of circumstance, expanding a linguistic repertoireas part of one’s scholarly or intellectual life these are all importantmatters, and there is a large and often finely-detailed literature devotedto them and their many ramifications. But there is another approach tobilingualism, one that considers it from a less communicative but moresymbolic perspective, and one that links the personal aspects of languageand languages with features that operate at more collective levels.If it is the linguistic condition of most adult human beings and if aswe are now regularly informed by some of the stranger practitioners ofthe linguistic arts monolingualism is an aberration, an affliction of thepowerful and a disease to be cured, then one might reasonably ask whybilingualism should elicit any specific attention. 4 As something easilyavailable to the poor and the illiterate, something that can be almosteffortlessly acquired by the youngest and most inexperienced membersof society, it might seem to have attracted rather more than its share ofacademic attention. Naturally, I don’t mean to suggest that language perse is now a completely open book to us. The workings of this marvellousfacility, which sets us apart in tremendous degree if not in basic principlefrom even those clever apes and dolphins, are not fully transparent ineither development or use. Still, within the broader study of language,what happens once could perhaps easily be seen as (mutatis mutandis)happening again. Why should a second or subsequent language warrantmore than an extending footnote to the broader linguistic enquiry? Why