Let's rewrite your own definition!


Good morning, guys! This is my first article in "A BILING GAL." In order not to waste your time, I will be straight to our topic right away!

As the topic above says, "Do you know what a bilingualism is?" Can you guess? A combination of the words "Bi-" which means two, and "Lingualism" which related to language. Yes, you're right but this is not all. 

So, let's get to the beginning of bilingualism.

In the Bible, there was Babel city where the leaders were building a tower in ordered to reach the heaven. And God punished the builder by destroying their, unity, giving them different languages. So, they couldn't work together because they couldn't understand each other's languages. It became the diversity in languages.


The tower of Babel


Recently, the main factors such as immigration, business travel and education are forces bringing people together. Someone acquires languages from their society or someone has to learn another languages for living.

The meaning of bilingualism had been discussing for centuries, Of course, there are a lot of definitions that were explained by famous linguists from all over the world as follows:

·         "Native-like control of two or more languages" (Bloomfield, 1993)
·      “Bilingualism as a person’s ability to process two languages.” (D. & Capizzi, 1990)
·         “A person speaking at least two languages.” (Myers-Scotton, 2006)
·        "Those who possess at least one of the language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) even to a minimal degree in their second language" (Macnamara, 1967)
·   "Those who demonstrated complete mastery of two different languages without interference between the two linguistic processes" (Oestreicher, 1974)
·        "The age at which the second language is learned the context in which the two languages have been learned or the domains in which is each use" (Fishman, 1968)


So, what is the exact definition of bilingualism?
Why don’t we revise the definition together?
For me, I can rewrite the meaning of bilingualism in the following;
“A person who can use two or more languages in order to communicate is able to switch the languages automatically.”

And what about yours? 

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