(or polyglossia)
A term that refers to a person's ability to communicate in two or more languages. The phenomenon is found commonly in border regions, especially in those whose geographical boundaries change from time to time. South-eastern Poland, for example, was formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, making Austrian the official language for a population whose native language was Polish but which was in contact with neighbouring Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Slovakian communities, and whose religious groups included Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish. Thus church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish were all likely to be used to varying degrees by inhabitants of the region, in addition to the Slavic languages. The phenomenon is also found in small countries that participate extensively in international relations: the Netherlands and Switzerland are especially well-known examples. In the Netherlands, children characteristically have instruction in Dutch as a first language, begin a second, third, and fourth (English, French, or German) within a few years of each other, and, if they plan to go to university, add several years of Latin and perhaps some Greek. Most high-school graduates can manage to communicate in two foreign languages; fluency in three or four is common among university graduates. Bilingualism is encountered also in small countries experiencing substantial immigration or made up of disparate groups. It is estimated that peoples from more than 90 different language communities have emigrated to Israel since the 1930s. It is encountered in large countries also. In the Soviet Union, as in Iran, China, and India — countries comprising people of many different ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds — a single 'national' language is inculcated as a unifying device, while the separate groups use their own languages for local communication. Even in a country where the languages share a common root, such as Italy, the regional variants may be almost mutually unintelligible. In all of these cases people who wish to communicate with others not in their immediate linguistic community are obliged to learn another language. The fact of two languages in a single person is commonplace in most parts of the world, but is still thought of as an oddity in many others. Most English-speaking countries seem to be among the latter group.
Bilingualism is actively studied by linguists who are interested in the way that speakers of one language accommodate the impact of another on their own; by sociologists and sociolinguists who trace change in social custom as a function of change in language; by teachers concerned to minimize the interfering effects of one language upon the learning of another; by psychologists who are interested in bilingualism as a natural laboratory for the study of the way the mind represents its knowledge; and of course by many others. The psychological issues are the most pertinent here.
One long-standing query has been whether instruction in a second language helps or hinders the student. The question seems not to have been asked when several years of Greek and Latin were customary constituents of the young scholar's programme. It has come to be asked largely following the development of linguistic nationalism. Although first undertaken in the context of educating children in Welsh or Irish, the studies have been extended to the education of many groups in their native language. The findings have been that educating a child in one language interferes with his or her ability to pass examinations in a second, and the interference is greater the more 'minor' the one language and the more elaborate the second. Initially interpreted as evidence that bilingualism interfered with or lessened intellectual capability, the data are now seen as supporting the view that particular skills acquired through one language may not be wholly available for transfer to a second, especially if the two languages are quite different. No evidence has been accumulated to suggest that intelligence is lessened or heightened by instruction in one language or another; what has been shown is that skill in manipulating the dominant symbols of the culture is better acquired one way than another.
Languages are said to differ in their ability to express information in one or another area or on one or another topic. The classic examples have to do with the vocabulary for varieties of snow among some Eskimo, and for varieties of camel in Arabic. A considerable philosophy has been built on related observations. The term 'linguistic relativity' marks the view of the linguists E. Sapir and his student B. L. Whorf, which in its dogmatic form is called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: the language one uses controls the way one thinks about the world. This extends well beyond differences in vocabulary items of Eskimo and Arab — or of a vintner for wines, or a perfumer for smells, or any other specialized terms or jargon: the claim is that the mind works differently. In this claim Whorf seemed to identify language with thought — an equation few linguists, psychologists, or philosophers accept at present — and went on to confuse the ability to learn to make a discrimination with the readiness with which it is made. That is, Whorf used lexical and syntactic aspects of a language as evidence for procedures of mind, and in so doing seems to have used faulty reasoning to arrive at a plausible conclusion. The conclusion is that the
symbols the mind uses in its activities actually affect the way the mind works. The interaction of symbol systems and mental operations is under present active study.
Languages do seem to differ in the ease with which they lend themselves to certain topical areas. Italian and French are rich and subtle in the areas of interpersonal relations, German lends itself easily to metaphysics, English dominates modern science — to name a few related languages. The structure of language, it has sometimes been suggested, also influences the way the mind works, perhaps in the way that speaking a particular language tends to shape the face. Whether a language requires many qualifications of the action before the action is named, or whether it is named first and then qualified; whether disparate items are stuck together to make new composites or whether features are analysed out and put into contrast; whether word order is a fixed or a free variable — these and other questions have been related to 'national character' and to mental activity. The topics are rich in speculation and poor in data.
They attract the psychologist's attention because of their relation to the topic of representation. Psychologists not only study the fact of behavioural change as a function of experience, but also try to give a plausible account of the means by which behaviour is controlled. Since what a person knows somehow affects what he or she does, some formalism is sought by the psychologist to accommodate the knowledge. That is, how knowledge is represented in mind and how best to represent it can be taken as important aspects of the psychologist's study. In this respect bilingual individuals are interesting test cases, for they can learn something through one of their languages and be tested for the knowledge through another; changes in performance as a function of changes in language can then sometimes be used to make plausible inferences about the mental operations underlying the behaviour. The findings suggest that knowledge is often situational and specific and that something learned through one language is not known to the person generally but is available to him or her only through that language. Recent evidence on the effects of stroke and related cerebral accidents upon language performance tends to bear out the supposition that knowledge and skill may be interfered with selectively, according to interference with the means by which the knowledge or skill were acquired.
(Published 1987)— Paul A. Kolers
Bibliography- Albert, M. L. and Obler, L. K. (1978). The Bilingual Brain.
- Haugen, E. (1974). 'Bilingualism, language contact, and immigrant languages in the United States: a research report, 1956–1970'. In Sebok, T. A. (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. x.
- Kolers, P. A. (1978). 'On the representations of experience'. In Gerver, D., and Sinaiko, W. (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication.
- Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems.
Recent research in bilingualism makes use of brain imaging techniques to investigate the cerebral representation of more than one language in the brain. Different areas are used for languages learned after the age of 4 or so years. For recent reviews see:
Bibliography- Fabbro, F. (2001). 'The bilingual brain: cerebral representation of languages'. Brain and Language, 79/2.
- Fornells, R. A., Rotte, M., Heinze, H. J., Noesselt, T., and Muente, T. F. (2002). 'Brain potential and functional MRI evidence for how to handle two languages with one brain'. Nature 6875.
