Questions and Tasks

Analyse the following situations from the point of view of factors promoting language maintenance and factors promoting language shift. Try to make a "lin­guistic forecast" suggesting a possible outcome for each of the situations in future.

Fadela Belarouci is a 12-year-old schoolgirl who lives in a suburb of Paris, France along with many families that have moved to France from Algeria and became French citizens. Yet, Fadela's mother speaks very little French; she doesn't work outside the home and only finds a need to use French in some shops. She saeaks Algerian Arabic with her women neighbors. But Fadela, her brothers and sisters speak Algerian Arabic to varying degrees, and are more flu-

ent in French. In fact, the older brothers have forgotten much of the Arabic they acquired as small children. Even though the parents speak Algerian Arabic to­gether, the children often respond in French. Because she has lived in France since birth and because all her schooling has been in French-medium schools, Fadela speaks mainly French. Furthermore, she considers herself to be French even though she is a Moslem. She watches the same French reality TV programs and likes the same French teenage singers as other French girls of her age.

Zhao Min speaks two dialects of Chinese as well as English. He's a com­modity trader for a joint venture of the government of the People's Republic of China and an international conglomerate. He comes from Nanjin, China, but di­vides his time between Beijing and Hong Kong in China, with extended stays in Europe. He studied English as part of his secondary schooling and university education. Today his job demands a good deal of English; he writes emails and has long-distance phone conversations - always in English - with his customers, for whom English is usually a second language, too (e.g. Serbs in Serbia). When he visits his family in Nanjin, he speaks his home dialect but when he deals with Chinese colleagues, he speaks the standard Mandarin dialect of the People's Re­public of China. This is the variety he speaks with his wife, who was raised in Beijing. Zhao Min has little spare time from his job, but when he does, he often watches films and has a huge collection of English-language movies on DVDs.

Monica Flori is a businesswoman who lives in a small town in northern Italy in the region near Modena and owns a small clothing store. She studied fi­nance at the University of Pisa. She lives in an area where there are lots of tour­ists, especially for skiing in the winter that is why Monica needs to speak Eng­lish and French. With French tourists she speaks French, but English is the lan­guage she uses with German tourists or other non-Italians. She studied these languages at school. She speaks standard Italian to Italian customers, but speaks the dialect spoken in the Modena region to local people. Monica's husband also comes from the region and speaks the local dialect as well as standard Italian. He speaks English, too, but not as well as Monica and he doesn't use it as often.

Bahar Solmaz is a young woman in her late twenties living in the Nether­lands who is of Turkish ancestry. She works as a reporter for a Turkish ethnic magazine, having studied for several years at a Turkish university. Her father came to the Netherlands in the early seventies as a migrant worker. He was looking for a better standard of living than he had in Turkey, but returned to Turkey to visit often. Bahar, her mother, and her older brother didn't follow him to the Netherlands until 2000. Throughout her day, Bahar associates with nu­merous people and her conversations necessarily involve different linguistic choices. For example, she always speaks Turkish with her parents and her older brother, but then speaks Turkish and Dutch alternately with her peers and her

three younger siblings. With her Dutch friends, she speaks Dutch. Bahar says it makes a difference where she is: When she is visited by her younger sister in her own home, srie alternates between languages much more than when the two of them run into each other in their parents' house, where she automatically will use more Turkish. Similarly, in the highly ethnic environment of her job, she uses Turkish exclusively with a colleague, but when she goes out at night with that same colleague, they will speak both Turkish and Dutch. Because of the number of Turks where she lives (the city of Tilburg) and the visits she regularly makes to Turkey, it is unlikely she will stop using Turkish extensively.

Abdulla Shalabi is a Palestinian who speaks both Arabic and English flu­ently. He immigrated to the United States a number of years ago and today he is a professor in the pharmacy school at a large US university. He uses English in his job; that :.s, he teaches, meets with colleagues, gives papers at conferences, and writes academic articles, all in English. But at home and with Arabic-speaking friends, the main vehicle of communication is a combination of Arabic and English, an example of codeswitching. That is, he sometimes switches lan­guages between sentences and often switches languages within a sentence. His university-ag<; daughter and her friends with parents from the Middle East speak Arabic fluent ly, although not as fluently as their parents. English has become her more dominant language and their Arabic shows some signs of converging to English grammatical features. She plans to study pharmacy, too.

9. Child bilingualism and second language acquisition

There sire two main questions and their answers that scientists all over the world are considering. First, why is the degree of bilingualism of child bilin-guals different from that of speakers who acquire a second language (L2) at a later age? Thut is, is there a cut-off point in language acquisition so that second-language learning is less successful after a certain age? Second, what are the fac­tors that account for the difficulties and degree of success that later learners have in acquiring a L2?

There ire also two main terms used when speaking about language acqui­sition. Bilingual child language acquisition generally refers to acquiring two or more languages when exposed to them as a very young child. For such children "acquisition" means spontaneous learning with little or no obvious effort or in­struction. The; name given to the study of theories to explain degrees of success­ful bilingualism beyond early childhood is second language acquisition (SLA). Researchers jrive a positive answer to the first question as if it is possible to ac­quire these linguistic systems in two languages simultaneously with native-like competence [is a young child. According to extensive studies, child bilinguals

can acquire two (or even more) languages as long as they are exposed to them, although they tend eventually to develop dominance in one of them because it's used more.

Unfortunately there isn't a clear answer to the second question why na­tive-like acquisition of an L2 seems so difficult at a later age. True, near-native acquisition at a later age can occur for very few learners who start learning a language beyond early childhood and achieve native-like competence. Whether there is a clear cut-off age for true native-like acquisition and what that age is still remain controversial; but evidence clearly shows there is a decline in the ability to achieve the same control of an L2 that LI speakers of that language have. We all know bright and motivated teenagers or adults who have studied a second language conscientiously and who may speak the studied language well, but certainly not as native speakers do.

When children hear two languages from birth, Meisel (1989) has called this bilingual first language acquisition. In this case, he stated, both languages are the child's first language. Researchers however use a different term for any child who is of pre-school age and who was exposed to language B more than one week after language A - such a child shows early second language acquisi­tion.