Bilingualism Flashcards
Mutual Intelligibility
The degree to which speakers of two different languages or dialects can understand each other.
Heritage Language
The language spoken in an immigrants country of origin.
Incomplete first-language acquisition
The failure to attain full native speaker proficiency of the first language.
Lingua Franca
The second language in common to all ethnic groups
English in Singapore
Dominant Language
The language of political and economic power within a bilingual society.
English in Singapore
Societal Language
The language spoken by the majority of people in a given society.
Code Switching
A change from one language to another within a single interaction.
three factors that influence the bilingual speakers choice of language
Strong pressure to use the dominant language
Tend to use the language of the listener
The burden of being understood fall squarely on the speaker of the non-dominant language.
Bilingual Accommodation
Sensitivity to the identity or ethnic background of the listener in selecting a language to use.
Receptive Bilingualism
The ability to understand a second language without being able to speak it.
Translation Equivalent
Words in two different languages that refer to the same concept.
Cognates
Words in two languages that have similar forms and meaning. Bier-beer
Interlingual homographs or “false friends
Words in two languages that have similar form but different meanings.
Gift means “poison” in German.
Bilingual Disadvantage
The observation that bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each of their languages and more difficulty retrieving words compared to monolinguals.
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Weaker links hypothesis
the proposal that the bilingual disadvantage can be explained in terms of lower word frequencies.
