Multilingualism, Multi-competence and (Limits to) the Interaction Between

Language Systems1
David Singleton
Trinity College Dublin / University of Pannonia
dsnglton@tcd.ie

Abstract
This article addresses the proposition that all talk whatsoever of bounds
between language-varieties in the mind should be abandoned. This
abandonment of boundaries is a standard view in respect of the semantic or
conceptual dimensions of language. The tendency does not, however, stop
there; being called into question is the whole notion that languages in the mind
are bounded entities in any of their aspects. The response offered here to such a
position is that language knowledge in the mind is all its aspects, in fact, highly
differentiated, and that this differentiation broadly follows the lines recognized
by the traditional conception which draws (always, of course, permeable) lines
between languages. Evidence is adduced in favour of this latter view from a
number of areas, including language loss and recovery, bilingual/multilingual
development and communication and the affective dimension of language
differentiation.
Keywords: Multilingualism; Multi-competence; Language Development; Mental
Representation

1. Introductory
Multi-competence is the brain-child of Vivian Cook, whose current basic perspective (Cook,
2016) is that multi-competence refers to an overarching, overall system discoverable in any
mind or community that uses more than one language. This seems unexceptionable, but it
appears that some multi-competence enthusiasts – and they are by no means alone – are
tempted to adopt a line of discourse which can be interpreted as postulating a degree of
unitariness of language knowledge that does not square with the conception of how
language has usually been seen as operating in the mind.
 Multilingualism, Multi-competence and (Limits to) the Interaction Between Language Systems

The abandonment of the notion of boundaries differentiating languages in the mind is quite
a standard view in respect of the semantic or conceptual levels of language (MacKenzie,
2016), and the common assumption is that for all language-varieties known by users of two
or more languages there is a common underlying conceptual base (Kecskes & Papp, 2000).
Athanasoupoulos (2016) in this context discusses the many influential accounts of the
mental architecture of multilingualism – particularly amongst psycholinguists – which
assume equivalence, fusion, and language-neutrality at the conceptual level (see e.g. De
Groot, 1992; Costa, 2005; Kroll & Stewart, 1994). He goes on to speak of the need to re-
examine this notion of a common conceptual base relating to the languages of multilinguals.
Citing Pavlenko and Jarvis (Pavlenko, 2005; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008), he points out that (i)
most lexical units that are considered ‘translation-equivalents’ across languages are not in
fact characterized by the same conceptual representation, even when they denote concrete
entities (Ameel et al., 2005), and (ii) there is increasing evidence from bilingual cognition
research of systematic cross-linguistic variation in the conceptual representation of a range
of different domains of experience. He concludes that learning a new language necessitates
creating new concepts as well as recalibrating existing concepts.

The claim that languages are not differentiated extends, however, beyond the conceptual
level. Researchers of diverse theoretical stances are increasingly tending to question the
notion that individual languages are genuinely individuated (e.g. De Bot, 2016; De Bot,
Lowie & Verspoor, 2007; Harris, 1998; Toolan, 2008; Vaid & Meuter, 2016). The response
offered in this article is that knowledge of languages in the mind is in all its aspects, in fact,
highly differentiated, and that such differentiation broadly follows the lines recognized by
the traditional boundaries between languages (which are always, of course, crossable and
permeable). Those of us who hold this view would add the claim that only by recognizing
such lines of demarcation can we explain a very large number of phenomena relating to
multiple language use, including everyday bilingual and multilingual communication.

2. Evidence against unboundedness

This section brings together a range of evidence from bilingual and multilingual experience
supporting the position that language-varieties in the mind are differentiated. The first

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subsection refers to the fact that when the use of languages is lost (as a result, for example,
of stroke), the use of the languages in question is often recovered language by language. It
also adverts to the situation where a language disorder may affect one of a multilingual’s
languages without affecting the others. The second subsection summarizes some of the
clear evidence of the separate early development of languages in multilinguals. The final
part of the section concerns the phenomenon of multilinguals’ keeping their languages
apart, relating examples of failure to comprehend utterance in well-known but unexpected
languages and to the privileging of particular languages in interlingual relationships.

2.1. Sequential recovery of languages and non-parallel aphasia

One kind of evidence against the idea that languages in the mind are unbounded lies in the
selective and sequential recovery of language varieties lost as a result of brain damage.
These patterns of selective recovery do not necessarily relate to distinct neural
representations of the different languages, but may have to do with damage to control
mechanisms located in the prefrontal cortex that activate the target language and inhibit
the non-target language (see e.g. Abutalebi 2008), in other words, distinguish between
different languages. There is also some mysterious but intriguing evidence from non-parallel
aphasia (see, e.g., Fabbro 1999, Chapters 12–16), an example of which is to be found below.

In relation to sequential recovery of lost languages, Whitaker (1978, p. 27) tells of the case
of an English Classics scholar, who, having lost the ability to use all his languages, recovered
first Ancient Greek, then Latin, then French and finally English (his L1). Grosjean (1982, p.
260) writes of a native speaker of Swiss German (which is, of course, markedly different
from Standard German) who recovered first French and later Standard High German, but
who never recovered his native variety. Fabbro (2002, p. 204), for his part, retails the report
of an Italian native speaker of Veronese (a variant of Venetian, structurally and lexically
different from Standard Italian), who had exclusively used Veronese in her everyday life,
except for a few rare words of Italian, but who, following a brain injury, communicated
exclusively in Standard Italian. Her condition subsequently improved to the point where she
could understand Veronese, but she continued to make productive use of only Standard
Italian. A more recent case is that of Jürg Schwyter (Schwyter, 2011), who, following a
stroke, lost the use of every one of his languages. He recovered receptive capacities in most

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of them (Standard German, English, Italian and French), but recovered full productive use
only of his mother tongue, Swiss German, and his main professional language, English.

As for non-parallel aphasia, Paradis and Goldblum (1989) report the case of a trilingual
subject who was a native speaker of Gujarati, which was the language he mainly used with
his family. The person in question resided in Madagascar, and so had additionally acquired
Malagasy. He had also learned French at school, and used this language in his professional
activities. Following a neurosurgical operation, he evidenced disorders typifying Broca’s
aphasia in Gujarati but no deficits in his other languages. Two years later he had fully
recovered Gujarati but had difficulties with Malagasy in terms of verbal fluency and
syntactic comprehension. Four years after the operation no disorder was detected in any of
his languages.

These cases of selective recovery and non-parallel aphasia point to the notion that each
language in the mind is bounded, not of course in terms of physiological separation, but in
terms of having its own processing dynamic, in other words having a degree of, as it were,
autonomy of developmental individuality.

2.2. Separate early development of languages

In respect of early bilingual development, the individuality of the progress of each language
is indicated, for example, by a number of studies (Schelleter, Sinka & Garman, 1997; Sinka
and Schelleter, 1998; Sinka, Garman and Schelleter, 2000) which looked at two children
acquiring, respectively, Latvian and English and German and English. Latvian and German
are both highly inflected languages whereas English, of course, is not a very inflected
language. The researchers found evidence of the development of functional categories in
Latvian and German from the earliest stages, but not in English, from which they concluded
that the nature of Latvian and German input is rich enough to trigger early functional
category development, whereas the English input is not. The strong implication of these
findings is that the languages acquired by a simultaneous bi-/multilingual develop
separately. The question, however, of whether this is in fact the case from the very earliest
stages of acquisition has been quite a controversial one.

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One much-cited view is that the simultaneous bi-/multilingual begins with a single language
system and that his/her languages separate only at a later stage (e.g. Volterra & Taeschner,
1978; see discussion in Clark, 2016, p. 386ff.). This standpoint suggests that simultaneous bi-
/multilinguals begin with a single language system, a single fused linguistic representation,
and that only around the age of three years do they begin to differentiate their languages
(see e.g. Pettito et al., 2001, p. 455). Language mixing certainly does manifest itself in the
language use of young multilinguals, and much of this mixing undoubtedly happens because
children may know an expression in one language for which they have no equivalent in their
other languages. Nicoladis and Secco (2000), for example, found that about 90% of the
mixing that they observed in very young bilinguals was due to their lexical gaps in one
language or another. Zhang’s (2006) work on sibling-sibling interaction between two
Chinese-English bilingual children illustrated this. For instance, the Chinese expressions kao-
ya (‘roast duck’) and fu-lu (‘pickle made from soya beans’) were used by the children in
English matrix utterances because the English translation-equivalents were unknown (and in
the latter case non-existent).

This is an entirely natural communication strategy – used by older children, adolescents and
adults as well as by very young bilinguals. Of itself it says nothing about the issue of the
separation or integration of a young multilingual’s languages. There is, in fact, relatively
little interaction between multiple languages at a morpho-syntactic level, and lexical mixing
is in general not all that frequent. The bilingual child, in other words, develops in each
language in a way similar to monolinguals in the languages in question and is able to make
appropriate language choices with different interlocutors (De Houwer 1990). What is more,
children use language-specific word ordering at the stage of two-word utterances and
complex sentences (e.g. Meisel 1989). Quay (1995) shows in her research the falsity of the
notion that the multilingual’s lexicon is systematically distributed across languages. She,
accordingly, strongly disputes the claim that there is a stage at which the multilingual has
just one lexical item in one or other language for a particular meaning.

The evidence seems to show that bi-/multilingual children generally keep their languages
apart when using them and are remarkably adept – even at a very early age (see e.g.
Genesee, Nicoladis & Paradis, 1995; Nicoladis 1998) – at making the right decisions as to

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which language to speak to whom. Bilinguals’ awareness of their bilingualism begins to

develop during their second year of life, possibly as early as 1 year; 7 months as is shown by
their first metalinguistic utterances referring to their bilingualism (Meisel, 2006). Where
languages are mixed, the mixing in question again seems to evidence an awareness – again
from an early age – of dual/multiple language competencies on the part of the interlocutors
in question (see e.g. Lanza, 1997). De Houwer has succinctly summed up the situation as
follows.

Like monolingual children, bilingual children pay a lot of attention to the input they
receive. They soon notice that this input differs depending on who is talking and in
what situation someone is talking. Just like monolingual children, bilingual children
attempt to talk like the people around them. Because of the bilingual situation,
however, the bilingual child has more options than the monolingual one … [A]t a
very young age bilingual children are skilled conversationalists who easily switch
languages. (De Houwer, 1995, p. 248)

2.3. Separation of languages in bi-/multilingual interaction generally

In their normal functioning, multilinguals, adults no less than children, are very attentive in
their use or non-use of specific languages to the competencies of their interlocutors. This is
clearly a necessary condition of successful communication. The bounds of a language in the
language user’s mind are thus set to an extent by the limits of intelligibility.

On the subject of intelligibility, an interesting message comes out of a story e-mailed to me

some years ago by the Finnish psychologist, Elizabet Service, about an experience her
multilingual sister had in France. I have cited it in a number of publications to illustrate
various arguments, but it seems especially relevant in the current context:

My sister, while studying in France was once addressed on the street in Finnish. Only
after several attempts by the speaker did she understand her own native language,
the point being that she was expecting French. (Service, personal correspondence)

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Service goes on to relate similar episodes in her own life with her L2, English, a language she
speaks to a very high level of proficiency:

I have had a very similar experience trying to make Finnish out of something
that was easy enough to understand when I realised it was English. (Service,
personal correspondence)

This story shows that it is possible for a person not to understand a language in which
he/she is highly proficient – including his/her mother tongue – if he/she is not expecting to
encounter it. Such evidence suggests that the language in question – as an entire system –
can be set at a very low level of activation, a radically lower, comprehension-preventing,
level of activation than the language(s) one is expecting to encounter. If it is possible for the
mind to select a language to render “dormant” in this fashion, as opposed to another
language/other languages rendered “ready for action”, this clearly speaks volumes about
differentiation of languages in the mind.

Especially interesting in this connection is the case of interlingual couples and families (see
Singleton & Pfenninger, 2018). Often two people who get involved with each other and who
speak different languages opt for one language as the “glue” of their relationship (Piller,
2002), as their “language of the heart” (Dewaele & Salomidou, 2017). This language is then
set apart from other languages in their repertoire by strong, affective factors. Piller found
that many couples perceive their private language as the foundation of their relationship:

[…] we were both happy then that we could speak German, and our relationship
started with drinking coffee and speaking, and so speaking was very important to
us and whenever we are having a serious conversation, it really needs to be in
German, otherwise it doesn’t go well, and it doesn’t feel right (Piller, 2002, p.
222; cf. Piller, 2001).

Usually the language in question is the L1 of one of the couple, but not always!

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In this connection, I should like to refer to an interesting case I came across quite recently,
and who kindly gave me permission to talk about them in public in a research context. The
couple, let call us call them Solange and Jan, met in France, where Solange grew up; Jan is
Dutch. They have used English with each other from the start of their relationship. They are
now married and living in the Netherlands and they both now have a good command of
each other’s language, but they continue to retain English as their “language of the heart”
for their private conversations. They have a three-year old daughter with whom Solange
communicates in French and Jan in Dutch. The common language of the household is
sometimes Dutch and sometimes French. The daughter does not yet know English and
makes fun of her parents when she hears them speak their language of intimacy. The
differentiation of usage of the languages is thus crystal-clear:

Solange to daughter: French;

Jan to daughter: Dutch;
Solange to Jan to Solange (family matters): French/Dutch;
Solange to Jan to Solange (private couple matters): English.

It would appear that this is anything but a “mish-mash”. It seems that the language bounds
in each language user’s mind are in this case related to the pattern agreed upon for French
and Dutch and by the role of English as the couple’s language of intimacy. The intelligibility
factor comes into the picture, though, in that English is (from the parents’ point of view
happily) unintelligible to the daughter. This latter situation will no doubt change with time.
We shall return to the emotional dimension of language differentiation in the next section.

3. More on “mish-mash”
We noted earlier the manner in which and the grounds on which Athanasoupoulos (2016)
rejects the concept of a common underlying, language-neutral conceptual base. An
additional argument running counter to the common conceptual base idea is the fact that
language-users seem to feel that their ‘take’ on the world changes as they switch from
language to language. An oft-cited adherent to this point of view was the early Latin poet
Quintus Ennius, who, according to the report of Aulus Gellius, used to say that, because he
functioned in three languages, Greek, Oscan and Latin, he had ‘three hearts’ (‘Quintus

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Ennius tria cordia habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret’). To bring
the discussion closer to our own times, we need to take very seriously the (for good reason)
well-worn truism of modern linguistics (see Lyons, 1963, p. 37f.), according to which every
language articulates the world uniquely in terms of its various forms and structures and in
terms of its concepts and configurations of concepts. (This clearly underlays what Quintus
Ennius was talking about!) It patently implies that, in order to fully understand what is being
said and written in a given language community and in order to be understood in the
relevant language community, a language user needs to make use of the conceptual system
specific to the language system in question, which of its nature will be different from those
of other languages he/she may know. The very obvious reality of a degree of cross-linguistic
conceptual permeability, influence and transfer does not undermine the other reality of this
essential differentiation (see Singleton 2003, 2012).

When Quintus Ennius said that because he had three languages he had three hearts, he was
referring to three centres of intelligence and thought as well as seats of the emotions. (The
Latin word for “heart”, cor, has a broader range of meaning than its English “equivalent”.)
The emotional denotation and connotation was nevertheless included in his claim, and
indeed this emotional dimension is increasingly addressed by current research into
conceptual divergences amongst the languages of the multilingual mind. Thus, Dewaele
(2016) refers to Pavlenko’s (2006) account of the feedback that emerged from the (Dewaele
and Pavlenko 2001–2003) Bilingualism and Emotion Questionnaire, where she found that
almost two-thirds of participants reported feeling like different people when they switched
languages. The evidence at the emotional level too, then, favours differentiation between
the multilingual’s languages.

Finally, let us consider the case where the language user genuinely seems not to know
which language an expression he/she is using belongs to, and the implications of such an
eventuality. For instance, Singleton’s (1987) study reports on Philip, an English-speaking
learner of French who also had some remnants of school knowledge of Latin and Irish, plus
some colloquial knowledge of Spanish acquired during a three-year sojourn in Spain. When
interacting in French, Philip often made use of Frenchified Spanish expressions (e.g. serc for
près de, “near” < Sp, cerca), but from his introspections on his use of these forms, it

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emerged that he occasionally did not know whether he had borrowed them from Spanish or
from Latin. In general, let it be said, Philip appeared to be acutely self-aware about his
strategy of borrowing from Spanish. He commented that he knew Spanish and French to be
historically related and remarked that he often deliberately made use of Spanish
expressions, pronounced à la française, in order to make good gaps in his French
vocabulary. Indeed, it emerged from the analysis of his data that Spanish was the privileged
source of transferred expressions in his French.

As for his not knowing whether particular expressions he borrowed had their origins in Latin
or in Spanish, given his low proficiency in Spanish and his rather vestigial knowledge of
Latin, we should probably not make too much of this — especially since Latin and Spanish, in
fact, have many expressions in common. De Angelis (2007, p. 65–67) discusses such learner
uncertainties in a similar fashion. She cites a French-Canadian learner of Italian with prior
knowledge of Spanish who, when attempting to speak Italian, used the Spanish word for
‘table’ – mesa – instead of the Italian word tavolo, apparently being under the impression
that mesa was Italian. Also cited by De Angelis is an English learner of Spanish with previous
knowledge of Italian who was familiar with two words for ‘money’ – dinero (Spanish) and
soldi (Italian) – but could not say which word belonged to which language. De Angelis takes
a comparable line with regard to her findings to that proposed above in connection to
Philip’s case. She proposes that “language tags or cues may have different strength values at
different stages of the acquisition process, and strengths may vary depending on changes in
language proficiency over time” (De Angelis, 2007, p. 86).

This is an entirely different kind of account from that which dismisses all idea of
differentiation in the mind regarding the languages known to an individual. To be noted also
is the fact that, in the instances De Angelis cites, the additional languages in question are
Spanish and Italian, which, like Latin and Spanish, have lexicons that to an extent resemble
each other. Such confusions, one strongly suspects, would have been far less likely if the
languages in question had been, for example, Hungarian and Chinese. One clearly must
conclude that there are indeed cases, at impoverished levels of proficiency, of multilingual
individuals’ being confused about which of their languages some of the words and phrases
they deploy belong to —especially when the languages concerned are closely related. The

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exigencies of multilingual communication, however, mean that such confusions cannot

afford to come anywhere close to being widespread. For multilingual communication to
work, the participants in such communication must be constantly sensitive to what will and
will not be understood by their interlocutors and must be attentive to navigating amidst the
various languages at their disposal adroitly and precisely. Such navigation relies, of course,
on the bounds set between these languages in the mind.

4. Concluding remarks
In conclusion, I should like to make reference to Werker’s work on early bilingualism, which
casts an interesting sidelight on the issues discussed above. Werker (2012) sums up the
challenges confronting the infant involved in the process of monolingual language
development, pointing out that such an infant has to deploy his/her:

perceptual knowledge of the rhythmical properties of the ... language, of the

speech sound categories that distinguish one possible word from another, and of
the sequences of sounds that are allowable within a word and/or the statistical
learning of other cues to segmentation. (Werker, 2012, p. 50)

It is only on this basis, she says, that the child can isolate different words and structures and
map them onto meaning.

Turning to the case of the child growing up in an environment involving more than one
language, such a child, she goes on to assert, has to master the rhythmical properties, the
phonetic categories, the phonotactic regularities, the word order patterns, the lexis–
concept configuration and the conceptualization of the world of each language. What is
more, the infant bilingual must do this, she states, without interlingual confusion.

The obvious addendum to Werker’s account is that what is true for the infant trying to
handle more than one language holds true in broad essence for multilinguals of any age!

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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Simone E. Pfenninger for her comments and suggestions regarding an
earlier version of this article.

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1 This article is based on the text of an invited paper delivered to IRAAL in April 2018

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