CC BY
105УДК 81-11 ББК 74
THE REALITY OF BILINGUALISM
Irfan Tosuncuoglu, 000-0002-0213-3574, PhD (ELT), Associate Professor, Department of Western languages and literatures, English language and literature division, Faculty of letters, Karabuk university, Karabuk Universitesi Demir £elik Kampusu, Kilavuzlar Koyu, 78050, Karabuk Turkey, irtosun@yahoo.com.
Anastasia L. Ignatkina, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6998-3602 Candidate of philological sciences, Associate Professor in the English language department; FSBEE of HE "Saratov State Law Academy", Volskaya, 1, Saratov, Russia; anastasiaignatkina777@gmail.com.
Abstract. Language is a tool for communication, and knowledge of languages connects people in the global community and helps them to overcome differences between various cultures. Language plays a significant role in the development of various types of relationships: it is the most important attribute of social contact and contributes to the development, expansion, and change of the entire spectrum of social relations. People become bilingual / multilingual for various reasons, such as migration, socio-economic situation, etc. Bilingualism is the ability of a person to use two languages effectively and fluently. As we know, bilingualism is a feature of multilingual communities. Bilingualism is relevant for different countries, where it finds various manifestations and solutions. Social and academic mobility have led to many states to introduce policies for bilingual education. The study examines the phenomenon of bilingualism in different countries and related issues in the context of globalization and language didactics.
Keywords: culture, language, bilingualism, advantages, disadvantages.
О ФЕНОМЕНЕ ДВУЯЗЫЧИЯ
Ирфан Тосункуоглу, доцент кафедры Западных языков и литературы, подразделение английского языка и литературы Филологического факультета Турецкого государственного университета Карабюк, irtosun@yahoo.com.
А.Л. Игнаткина, кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры английского языка ФГБОУ ВО «Саратовская государственная юридическая академия»; Россия, г. Саратов, ул. Вольская, 1; anastasiaignatkina777@gmail.com.
Аннотация. Любой язык - это инструмент общения, а знание языков тесно связывает людей в мировом сообществе и помогает преодолевать различия между культурами. Язык играет важную роль в развитии самых разных видов отношений: он является важ-
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нейшим атрибутом социальных контактов и способствует развитию, расширению, изменению всего спектра общественных отношений. Люди становятся двуязычными по разным причинам, таким как миграция, социально-экономическая ситуация и т.д. Двуязычие - это способность человека эффективно, альтернативно и свободно пользоваться двумя языками. Как известно, двуязычие - это особенность мультикультурных сообществ. Проблема двуязычия сегодня актуальна для разных стран, где она находит разные проявления и пути решения. Социальная и академическая мобильность привела к тому, что многие государства ввели политику двуязычного образования. В исследовании рассматривается феномен билингвизма в разных странах и связанные с ним вопросы в контексте глобализации и лингводидактики.
Ключевые слова: культура, язык, двуязычие, преимущества, недостатки.
Introduction
Bilingualism resulting from the combination of linguistic diversity with interaction among different human groups is an integral part of human history. The underpinning of the discussion related to bilingualism has always been the social significance of the language. Indeed, language represents our social identity fundamentally and plays a major role in both the evolution of society as a whole and the development of people as individuals. As a Turkish proverb states, "One language [equals] one man; two languages [equal] two men [and so on]." This means that people who know more than one language are positively enabled in many respects.
As a token of integration of different countries and peoples, bilingualism has been known as natural characteristic of humanity since ancient times; as a linguistic phenomenon it appeared relatively recently. Just a century ago, European society identified itself as monolingual, where each European language was associated with only one ethnic group (according to the principle of "one language - one ethnic group"). At the same time, bilingualism was perceived as a deviation from the generally accepted norm, and was contrary to the stability of the language systems that were in contact [10]. Such approach to bilingualism might be the reason why, for almost the entire Twentieth Century, studies of language contacts were conducted within the framework of a monolingual paradigm. It was at the turn of the Twenty-first Century when linguistic research manifested interest in the phenomenon of bilingualism.
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Bilingualism or Multilingualism?
The term "bilingualism" has various descriptions among scholars. Defining bilingualism is problematic because individuals with varying bilingual characteristics may be classified as bilingual. Accordingly, definitions of bilingualism range from a minimal proficiency in two languages, to an advanced level of proficiency which allows the speaker to function as a native-like speaker of two languages. In contemporary scholarship on bilingualism it is commonly defined as the conscious and active use of (at least) two languages [5].
With the spread of migration across the globe the term "multilingualism" came into use along with the term "bilingualism" [8; 9]. For example, in the UNESCO policy documents both terms are used, which means that UNESCO takes the same position about the value of both kinds of language use: "UNESCO promotes mother tongue instruction in the context of bilingual education (BE)/multilingual education (MLE) from the earliest years of schooling" [7: 2].
The most commonly accepted definition of a multilingual person today is the following: "a multilingual individual is the one who can maintain communication in more than one language" [14: 4]. Importantly, a multilingual person cannot be considered as a person in whom two or three first languages are summed up; each individual is a carrier of their own personal multicompetent knowledge, which cannot be measured in terms of monolingual standards [10].
Since the term "bilingualism" can be seen as referring to learning and using more than a single language some scholars argue for using it as a generic term for multilingual language education [4]. However, to avoid ambiguity, a distinction between bilingualism as referring to just two languages and multilingualism as referring to more than two languages should be drawn.
The Reality of Bilingualism in Selected Countries
In the contemporary world, a great number of the people are bilingual. The best examples of the countries with bilingualism are Great Britain, New Zealand, Switzerland, Republic of South Africa, Canada, India, to name a few [1].
Researchers identify the following forms of national (social) bilingualism:
- bilingualism, where two or more languages are state languages due to historical processes (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Belarus);
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- bilingualism, where one state language and several local languages coexist; in this case, either only one language (state) or two languages (state and local) can be used (Russia, Great Britain, Spain, Kenya);
- immigrant bilingualism, where migrants feel the need to learn a language the language/languages of the new state for practical reasons (most Western European countries, Turkey) [10].
In the last decades, immigration has become a serious issue for many countries, Turkey being one of them. This country has long been a land of immigration and asylum. From 1923 to 1997, more than 1.6 million people immigrated to Turkey, mostly from Balkan countries. During the Cold War, thousands of asylum seekers fled to Turkey from communist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, this pattern began to change as increasing numbers of asylum seekers began to arrive from Iran and Iraq, as well as other developing nations. Turkey also experienced a mass influx of almost half a million mostly Kurdish refugees from Iraq in 1988 and 1991, as well as mass influxes of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), and Turks in 1989, 1992-1995, and 1999 [13]. Currently, more than 4 million Syrian immigrants live in Turkey. Many Syrian children may become natural bilinguals in Turkish and in their mother tongue, with the prospect of learning one or more additional languages in the future. This form of public bilingualism is characterized by two opposite situations: additive bilingualism and subtractive bilingualism [4]. In the first case, the second and subsequent languages are learned together with further mastering of the first (title) language of the individual, without hindering its development. In the second case, each subsequent language replaces the previous one. This latter situation is typical for children from immigrant families who master the official language of their country of residence at the expense of the development of their native language.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the gain in autonomy of former subnational republics resulted in the political course towards equal development of all peoples comprising former union. Article 68, paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation states: "Republics have the right to establish their own languages. These languages can be used by the governmental bodies, local authorities, and state institutions of the republics along with the national language of the Russian Federation". By adopting the law "On Languages of the Peoples of Rus-
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sia" and corresponding laws in each republic, the status of the republics' languages has changed.
In the Russian Federation, bilingualism is common in the republics of Altai, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the republics of the North Caucasus, and Buryatia. In Russia, like any multi-ethnic state with a bilingual population, the language situation may be depicted by a hierarchy represented as an inverted pyramid having three layers. The upper layer consists of monolingual native speakers of the state language — the speakers of the Russian language in the USSR and in modern Russia (here we disregard the possible knowledge of foreign languages). The middle layer is made up of bilingual citizens. At the bottom are monolingual speakers of non-dominant languages (or bilingual speakers who do not speak the state language). In some countries (India, a number of African countries), the top layer is missing, and bilingual people are at the top. This hierarchy correlates with the social hierarchy in one respect: the lower layer of the language hierarchy also has a low social status. These are either people who are employed in agriculture or in the household, or unassimilated immigrants [10: 16].
At the same time, social and educational mobility has led to a significant shift towards direct communication, both between institutions and individuals. Learning foreign languages is becoming more and more widespread around the globe because of occupational, educational, economic, political, social, cultural, and migration-related factors. In this respect, many countries have adopted strategies designed to put bilingual education at the forefront. In Kazakhstan, for example, English and other foreign languages, in addition to Russian and Kazakh, have become in high demand. The National Education and Science Development Programme (2016-2019) mirrored this key trend in the development of trilingual education and provided a roadmap for trilingual education from the years of 2015 to 2019. The main objective of this programme was to include trilingualism in all levels of education in Kazakhstan. In this regard, the Ministry of National Education has introduced some common strategies for prospective trilingual teachers [8].
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Negative and Positive Effects of Bilingualism on Language Learning
Bilingualism has a mixed effect on the process of learning a foreign language.
On the one hand, there are investigations highlighting a multiplicity of strengths of bilingualism pertaining to language leaning. Within the context of childhood bilingualism, Bialystok (2017) asserts that bilingualism is an important factor affecting the course of children's early development. Early bilingualism encourages a child to learn a third language, contributing to the development of their metalinguistic interests. Children become very attentive to their own and other people's speech, they understand the communicative situation and are open to corrections and comments [3].
According to Barac & Bialystok (2012), bilingual education has advantages both for speakers of non-dominant languages, and for English monolinguals. The results of the survey conducted among 104 six-year-old children belonging to 4 groups (English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilin-guals, Spanish-English bilinguals) aimed to examine the generality of the bilingual effects on development have shown that all bilingual groups exceeded monolin-guals [2]. The learners in bilingual education are reported to be more efficient at processing and relaying information [12; 15]. Peachy (2016) assumes that American model of instruction where instruction is given in both the mother tongue and the national language should be evaluated for suitability and applicability in Turkey [11].
Among the common benefits of bilingualism for language learning acknowledged by UNESCO are the following:
- when used at home and/or at school, it promotes literacy in the mother tongue (L1) and later in the second language (L2);
- it facilitates learning both of academic subjects as well as the second language (L2);
- it improves learning outcomes as it promotes dialogue and interaction between learners and teachers by means of better communication and understanding;
- it raises the quality of education by emphasizing understanding and creativity rather than repetitive memorization [7].
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Despite the benefits of bilingual/multilingual education, negative impacts exist as well. For example, in childhood bilingualism, more often than not, children are taught in a language that they have not mastered [7]. In higher education, the study of a foreign language by bilingual students has its own specific issues [6]: three (or more) language systems come into interaction, each of them having its own structure; therefore, disadvantages of bilingualism can be seen in decision- making, speaking, writing and thinking. As is argued by Mosin et. al. (2017), bilingualism may have a negative impact on an individual's vocabulary capacity because the use of one language is less frequent than the use of the oth-er(s). Moreover, bilingual students may have some disadvantages in vocabulary in each language, resulting in mixing-up words, grammar rules, etc. Finally, there is a possibility of losing of one of the languages or the underdevelopment of both languages [6].
Nevertheless, it is unrealistic and impractical to advocate against the benefits of bilingualism for language learning. The overall advantages for cognitive skills and metacognitive interests of the learner and the potential social and linguistic benefits of bilingualism outweigh any disadvantages connected with this phenomenon. Bilingual people definitely have more advantages in finding jobs, meeting new people and adapting new cultures.
Conclusion
In an age of rapid globalization, the number of bilingual people is increasing. Bilingualism is considered a major tool for understanding the world.
Currently, bilingualism is defined in a completely different way than before. It has a multi-component, flexible definition: it does not mean the ability to speak two languages equally fluently. It means being connected to the linguistic and cultural systems of both languages.
Whilst learning foreign languages is becoming more and more widespread around the world, the issue of bilingual education is becoming very relevant for many countries. It is especially true in the area of higher education, since academic and social mobility have increased. In response to new needs, many countries have adopted strategies to prioritize bilingual education. Though bilingualism has both negative and positive effects on language development (the possible existence of any effects on cognitive skills, linguistic capabilities, functions of brain, etc. is controversial), it can be considered to be an advantage in individual's life
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and its benefits outnumber the disadvantages. To this end, this topic is becoming popular and needs to be investigated in future studies in details.
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11. Peachy, W.S. (2016). The Problematic Interaction between the Mother Tongues, the National Language and Foreign Language Instruction in Turkish Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 232, 479 - 485.
12. Pliatsikas, C. (2015). Keeping actively bilingual makes our brains more efficient at relaying information. The Conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/keeping-actively-bilingual-makes-our-brains-more-efficient-at-relaying-information
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14. Wei L. (2008). Research perspectives on bilingualism and multilingualism. The Blackwell handbook of research methods on bilingualism and multilingualism. Oxford, 2008. Pp. 3-17.
15. Yang, J., Gates, K.M., Molenaar, P., & Li, P. (2015). Neural changes underlying successful second language word learning: An FMRI study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 33, 29-49.
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