Bilingualism and Multilingualism

emotional level. It is possible for individuals to have multiple mother tongues. The Indian social context is characterised by grass root multilingualism which makes bi/multilingualism a characteristic at the levels of individual as well as society. Most Indians use more than one language to communicate in various domains of their daily life activities.

Thus, multilingualism is a way of life in India. Studies reveal that bilingualism/ multilingualism facilitates cognitive, linguistic, and academic competence of children. great deal in the rate of their language development as well as in how they go about it. But when you take a general view of children’s acquisition of language all over the world you find some predictable pattern in which children proceed from almost no use of language to the point of becoming competent language users.

Language develops through some of the stages discussed below. Newborn babies and young infants make a variety of sounds, which gradually get modified to resemble words. The first sound produced by babies is crying. Initial crying is undifferentiated and similar across various situations.

Gradually, the pattern of crying varies in its pitch and intensity to signify different states such as hunger, pain, and sleepiness, etc. These differentiated crying sounds gradually become more meaningful cooing sounds (like ‘aaa’, ‘uuu’, etc.) usually to express happiness. At around six months of age children enter the babbling stage. Babbling involves prolonged repetition of a variety of consonants and vowel sounds (for example, da—, aa—, ba—).

By about nine months of age these sounds get elaborated to strings of some sound combinations, such as ‘dadadadadada’ into repetitive patterns called echolalia . While the early babblings are random or accidental in nature, the later babblings seem to be imitative of adult voices. Children show some understanding of a few words by the time they are six months old. Around the first birthday (the exact age varies from child to child) most children enter the one-word-stage .

Their first word usually contains one syllable – ma or da, for instance. Gradually they move to one or more words which are combined to form whole sentences or phrases. So they are called holophrases. When they are to months of age, children enter a two-word stage and begin to use two words together.

The two-word stage exemplifies telegraphic speech . Like telegrams (got admission, send money) it contains mostly nouns and verbs. Close to their third birthday, i.e. beyond two-and-a- half years, children’s language development gets focused on rules of the language they hear.

How is language acquired? You must be wondering: “How do we learn to speak?” As with many other topics in psychology, the question of whether a behaviour develops as a result of inherited characteristics (nature) or from the effects of learning (nurture) has been raised with regard to language. Most psychologists accept that both nature and nurture are important in language acquisition.