Bilingualism in Childhood

Project Report from the year 2009 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1, Syddansk Universitet (Syddansk Universitet, Sonderborg), language: English, abstract: A lot of people in the world are bilingual. People in Africa and Asia often speak theircommunity language and additionally an official language like English or French. It isnot a big surprise when calling in mind that according to Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmathof the Max-Planck-Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie, Leipzig there are about6500-7000 languages in the world and according to www.welt-in-zahlen.de 193countries. That makes an average of 35 languages per country. Despite the fact that bilingualism is widespread, there are a lot of negativeopinions in the mind of people. People say for example Your kid is going to get allthese languages mixed up. , when will she (or he) use that (language) (both cf. Bosemark, 2006b, my italics) or that bilingual children are overstrained and that theystart later to talk than their monolingual peers (cf. Leist-Villis, 2008). Within this research-paper I will deal with bilingualism in childhood. Moreprecisely I will answer the research question What are the reasons for parents toraise their child bilingually . First I will define the term bilingualism. For that I quote afew definitions of bilingualism from experts and afterwards I will define the one I willwork with. Afterwards I will introduce some successful methods applied by parentsand I will point out the advantages and disadvantages of the methods I found inliterature. I will continue explaining the research I have done on the topic followed bythe analysis of my data. Concluding I will answer the research question and give aprospective view on possible future research. Bilingualism is a huge topic and to look on it more deeply I decided to considerfamilies who raised their children English-German or German-English. To get incontact with families bringing up their children in that way, I wrote articles in internetcommunities and designed a questionnaire that I sent to several families raising theirchild/ren bilingually who answered my requests. In addition to the internet and myquestionnaire I considered books that deal with the topic.