THE POLYGLOTTER

Multilingual individuals

A multilingual person, in the broadest definition, is one who can communicate in more than one language, be it actively (through speaking and writing) or passively (through listening and reading). More specifically, the terms bilingual and trilingual are used to describe comparable situations in which two or three languages are involved. A generic term for multilingual persons is polyglot.

Multilingualism could be rigidly defined as being native-like in two or more languages. It could also be loosely defined as being less than native-like but still able to communicate in two or more languages.

Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children acquiring two languages in this way are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of simultaneous bilinguals one language usually dominates over the other. This kind of bilingualism is most likely to occur when a child is raised by bilingual parents in a predominantly monolingual environment. It can also occur when the parents are monolingual but have raised their child or children in two different countries.

Definition of multilingualism

One group of academics argues for the maximal definition which means that speakers are as native-like in one language as they are in others and have as much knowledge of and control over one language as they have of the others. Another group of academics argues for the minimal definition, based on use. Tourists, who successfully communicate phrases and ideas while not fluent in a language, may be seen as bilingual according to this group.

However, problems may arise with these definitions as they do not specify how much knowledge of a language is required to be classified as bilingual. As a result, since most speakers do not achieve the maximal ideal, language learners may come to be seen as deficient and by extension, language teaching may come to be seen as a failure. One does not expect children to “speak chemistry” like Nobel prize winners or to have become a professional athlete by the time they have left school, yet for graduating school children anything less than fluency in a second language could be seen as inadequate.

At the other extreme, arguing that someone who can say “hello” in more than one language is multilingual trivializes the language learning process.

Since 1992, Cook has argued that most multilingual speakers fall somewhere between these minimal and maximal definitions. Cook calls these people multi-competent.

Learning language

A broadly held, yet nearly as broadly criticized, view is that of the American linguist Noam Chomsky in what he calls the human ‘language acquisition device ‘— a mechanism which enables an individual to recreate correctly the rules (grammar) that speakers around the learner use. This device, according to Chomsky, wears out over time, and is not normally available by puberty, which explains the relatively poor results adolescents and adults have in learning aspects of a second language (L2).

If language learning is a cognitive process, rather than a language acquisition device, as the school led by Stephen Krashen suggests, there would only be relative, not categorical, differences between the two types of language learning.

Comparing multilingual speakers

Even if someone is highly proficient in two or more languages, his so-called communicative competence or ability may not be as balanced. Linguists have distinguished various types of multilingual competence, which can roughly be put into two categories:

• For compound bilinguals, words and phrases in different languages are the same concepts. That means that ‘chien’ and ‘dog’ are two words for the same concept for a French-English speaker of this type. These speakers are usually fluent in both languages.

• For coordinate bilinguals, words and phrases in the speaker’s mind are all related to their own unique concepts. Thus a bilingual speaker of this type has different associations for ‘chien’ and for ‘dog’. In these individuals, one language, usually the first language, is more dominant than the other, and the first language may be used to think through the second language. These speakers are known to use very different intonation and pronunciation features, and sometimes to assert the feeling of having different personalities attached to each of their languages.

• A sub-group of the latter is the subordinate bilingual, which is typical of beginning second language learners.

The distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism has come under scrutiny. When studies are done of multilinguals, most are found to show behavior intermediate between compound and coordinate bilingualism. Some authors have suggested that the distinction should only be made at the level of grammar rather than vocabulary, others use “coordinate bilingual” as a synonym for one who has learned two languages from birth, and others have proposed dropping the distinction altogether (see Baetens-Beardsmore, 1974 for discussion).

Many theorists are now beginning to view bilingualism as a “spectrum or continuum of bilingualism” that runs from the relatively monolingual language learner to highly proficient bilingual speakers who function at high levels in both languages (Garland, 2007)