Early Bilingualism. Growing up with two languages

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar: Contact Linguistics, language: English, abstract: There are millions of children around the world who grow up bilingually or even multilingually. They need to know many different languages to be able to communicate with their parents, their teachers, with the people they buy their groceries from, or with officials who might all speak a different language. For those children, for their parents and the society that surrounds those it is more than normal to be multilingual. Over the past decades the topic of bilingualism has become more and more important in the western part of the world too. There are many families who start teaching their children two and more languages but it is also still a subject that is highly debated between scholars from all over the world. People are afraid that teaching two languages to a child might harm his or her development. They do not want to overburden their children or cause any severe damages. Therefore many parents and caretakers still decide for one language which they will teach to their child(ren). This paper is going to analyse some aspects of the question how children become bilinguals and which difficulties might occur along the way while trying to prove that children are very well able to learn two and even more languages from birth. After starting out with a short personal introduction, the terms 'bilingualism', 'early bilingualism' and 'late bilingualism' are going to be defined. Afterwards types of child language acquisition are explained and two different theses on how children become bilingual are shortly looked at. It is going to be looked at some specialities in child language acquisition and different language characteristics of early bilingual speech are highlighted. In conclusion it is going to be looked at some possibilities to support children in their bilingual development.