Language Development in Simultaneous Bilingual Children

Abstract

While the European Union officially favours multilingualism, the reality is that teachers and other pedagogically engaged people harbour deep-seated prejudices against multilingualism. They fail to recognize code-switching as normal behaviour for a bilingual; assume that every bilingual must have a dominant language; and worry that many children may be semilingual, unable to function in either of their languages. This chapter reviews these issues in light of data from a study of bilingual first language acquisition (in which children are exposed to two languages from birth) with a focus on Romance languages in combination with German.1