BILINGUALISM

DEFINITION: The definition of bilingualism has been a great debate through the language history. The most recognize definitions are: Native-like control of two languages (Bloomfield) Incipient bilingualism is the initial stages of contact between two languages. (Diebold) Bilingualism is something relative because the point of which the speaker of a second language becomes bilingual is arbitrary and impossible to determine. (Mackey)

Bilingualism Levels: Social and individual Individual: a person who acquire a second language by a natural or systematic process. Social: it is when a country has two official languages. It is also difficult to determine when a country is bilingual because there are two possibilities: (1) a country than have many multilingual people, but it is not a multilingual country or (2) a country that is multilingual although the most of people are monolingual.

Discussions of individual bilingualism involve many aspects such as linguistics and psycholinguistics. In the same way at the social level there are other dimensions such as historical, educational, political and so on. MEASURING Degree: Any line drawn must cross not just one general language dimension, but many more specific threads of ability (John Edwards: 8) Basic language skills: There are four language skills that determine bilingual proficiency, Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, in the same way these dimensions have possible subdivisions. No one of these skills determines or is determined for another; each person has different aptitudes to assimilate one dimension better than another. Bilingualism measure methods: There are many test used to measure bilingualism such as: Rating scales and fluency: these can involve interviews, language usage measures and selfassessment procedures. Flexibility: present picture-naming or word completion tasks. Dominance: ask people to response to instructions in two languages and measure their response time.

There still many other factors than can affect bilingualism measure, such as: attitude, age, sex, intelligence, memory, linguistic distance between the two languages and context of testing.

Labeling bilingualism: Is also difficult to determine neat categories of ability or degrees of bilingualism, these are some of them: Individual with great bilingual capacities: ambilinguals are people who have equally function in both languages; balanced bilinguals and equilinguals are people who have more roughly equivalent varieties. Individuals with non-fluent bilingualism: they are usually called just bilinguals.

Also bilinguals are classified in receptive (passive) and productive (active), the first one is who can understand a language but cannot produce it themselves, and the second one is who can understand and produce. Bilingualism can be primary or secondary depends of the way of how the person obtain the second language, the first one is when a person acquire this competence in a natural way, and the second one when it is acquired in systematic and formal instruction way.