The Monolingual Bias in Bilingualism Research, or: Why Bilingual Talk is (Still) a Challenge For Linguistics

Abstract

For a long time, linguists found it difficult to account for the use of two or more ‘languages’ within one utterance by the same speaker. It was acknowledged of course (from the nineteenth century onwards, at the latest) that languages can ‘borrow’ structures from other languages without ever returning them to the ‘owners’ (to stick to this somewhat problematic metaphorical field). No doubt languages such as German or, even more so, English had massively copied lexical and — to a lesser extent — grammatical elements (above all derivational affixes) from other languages, such as Latin or French. However, these borrowings were exclusively analysed post factum, i.e. after they had become fully incorporated into the borrowing language. Few linguists were interested in languages whose status was unstable and ambiguous; among them was the Austrian Hugo Schuchardt who investigated ‘mixed’ languages such as creoles and Romani varieties as early as 1884 and came to the conclusion ‘dass eine Sprache A ganz allmählich, durch fortgesetzte Mischung, in eine von ihr sehr verschiedene B übergehen kann’ [‘that a language A can transform slowly but steadily, by constant mixture, into a language B which is very different from it’]. He continued on a somewhat fatalistic note: ‘Für die Beantwortung der Frage aber ob sie an einem bestimmten Entwickelungspunkt noch A oder schon B zu nennen sind, fehlte es uns gänzlich an Kriterien’ [‘However, we would lack all criteria to answer the question whether they can still be called still A or already B at a certain point of development’] (1884: 10).