Acquisition of multiple languages simultaneously - third version

Acquisition of multiple languages simultaneously

Andreinna Delgado Ricci    

Nowadays, languages of all kinds and origins are becoming a social requirement for different purposes, this globalisation phenomenon in which the whole world increases human activity by interact and share culture, worldviews, ideas and commercial exchange between countries have promoted the expansion of plurilinguism during the last years. The plurilinguism is the use of three or more languages for a single speaker or a community. That can occur for example in a child of immigrant parents which is necessarily exposed to the acquisition of several languages at the same time.  In that case, there is a particular process and stages that the child should get over progressively. However, some issues are also part of this process due to the quantity of grammatical systems, vocabulary, phonetic, among others, trying to be acquired for the child.

The purpose of my personal writing project is to describe and show to the reader what are the steps and skills that the child develops during the process of acquisition of multiple languages ​​at once and some issues that also emerge as part of this process.

Conventional Language is a complex system of communication full of grammatical structures with different phonetic characteristics and lexicon acquired in early childhood by human beings as a result of the necessity of communicating our feelings, needs, desires, thoughts and opinions to other people. Nevertheless, there are specific cases in which children are exposed to two or more languages during the child cognitive period of the language acquisition.

In that period, usually the child acquires the capacity to perceive and comprehend its native language, the one used by the parents and within the social context the child interacts, to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Over time, the child gets the phonology, vocabulary and also the syntax acquiring progressively the capacity to infer grammatical rules of the language and the ability of create its own sentences even if the child never has heard it before. If the child by the contrary is exposed to two or more languages at once, either by one of the parents or by the context within the child grows up, there is a similar process of the language acquisition but with certain characteristics due to the extremely broad and diverse quantity of communication linguistic systems.

Volterra and Taeschner (1978) develop in their article “The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children” the three stages of bilingual language acquisition. In the first one the child acquires one lexical system which includes words from both languages. In the second stage, the child is able to distinguish two different lexicons, but applies the same grammatical rules for both languages, and in the third stage the child speaks two languages differentiated both in lexicon and syntax.

As we can see the process of language acquisition that involves multiple languages requires a more complex cognitive process by the child, in consequence there is a common issue presented in those cases in which children acquire two or more languages simultaneously: Code-switching.

Code-switching occurs when the child combines more than one language in a single speech. It happens due to the lack of the pragmatic, lexical or grammatical competence. The kid uses certain structures, specific expressions or vocabulary that has already acquired in one of the languages instead of the others when the child doesn’t find and equivalent for the word or expression he/she wants to express, this is one of the moments when code-switching appears promoting the interference of other languages during the communicative act.

Another reason why Code-switching occurs is the dominance of one of the languages; this can happen for the frequent use of that stronger language more than the other ones, thus the child gradually develop and improve the skills and communicative competences in this language.

Although Code-Switching can be describe as an issue presented during the language acquisition process and beyond for many bilingual and multilingual speakers, I think being raised in that way can be a very useful support for this globalised world. Even knowing those people are not going to have the same communicative performance in all the languages they were exposed to, the great tools they can rely on for an academic future are going to be an advantage over other people that should start from the very beginning, which is even a more complex and hard process learning a different language being an adult and in a conscious way and not as a natural acquisition process.