BILINGUALISM

INTRODUCTION TO
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
 INTRODUCTION
• SOCIOLINGUISTICS
• Study of language in relation to the society.
• It is the descriptive study of the effect of any
and all aspects of society, including
cultural norms, expectations, and context.
• Sociology of language
 Language, Culture and Society

Language

Culture Society

Language – an emanating force in a society that establishes a culture, which

through its feats and festivals, portrays the behavioural, social, ethical, and
religious, picture of the population of that society in both the paradigms i.e. the
emotional and the intellectual.
3 views:
It is the characteristics of a Community
It is Material & Artifacts
It is socially acquired Knowledge
 What is Culture?

“As I see it, a society’s culture consists of

whatever it is one has to know or believe in
order to operate in a manner acceptable to
its members… Culture, being what people
have to learn as distinct from their biological
heritage, must consist of the end product of
learning: knowledge, in a most general…
sense of the term.”
(Goodenough z
 Language and dialect
• Dialect is a variety of a language that is a
characteristic of a particular group of the language's
speakers. The term is applied most often to regional
speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by
other factors, such as social class. A dialect that is
associated with a particular social class can be
termed a sociolect and a regional dialect may be
termed a regiolect or topolect. The other usage
refers to a language that is socially subordinate to a
regional or national standard language,
 BILINGUALISM
&
MULTILINGUALISM
 BILINGUALISM
• ‘Native like control of two languages’—
Bloomfield 1935
• ‘Alternate use of two or more
languages’- Mackey 1957
• ‘The ability of an individual to speak two
or more languages’- Trudgill 1992.
• Bilingual: Someone with native or native-
like control of two languages.
 Bilingualism & Multilingualism

• Many sociolinguists use the term

‘bilingualism’ to refer to individuals
even if they are trilingual or
quadrilingual, and reserve the term
‘multilingualism’ for nations or
societies, even if only two languages
are involved.
 The Notion of Bilingualism
• Bilingualism is the ability to use two
languages. However, defining bilingualism can
be problematic since there may be variation in
proficiency across the four language
dimensions (listening, speaking, reading and
writing) and differences in proficiency
between the two languages. People may
become bilingual either by acquiring two
languages at the same time in childhood or by
learning a second language sometime after
acquiring their first language.
 The Bilingual Individual
• In most cases the first language learnt –the mother tongue –is
also the most used.
• ‘second languages’ tend also to be ‘secondary’ in terms of use
i.e. auxiliary languages.
• In some cases, especially migrant ones the mother tongue
loses its importance as primary medium of communication
and is limited to use at home, with family and friends, and is
displaced and replaced in other domains by the dominant
language of the host community.
• Such situations are common to immigrant and refugee groups.
• E.g. Indo-Pak migrants in England and America, East European
refugees in Western Europe, Afghan refugees in Pakistan .
• A common fallacy is that ‘language mixture’ or
code mixing, switching in bilinguals reduces
the communicative act, however the contrary
is true. Language mixture facilitates
communication for bilinguals as they have
substantially shared repertoires .
 Degrees of Bilingualism
• Monolingualism: An individual who can speak
only one language.
• Ambilingualism: equal mastery of both
languages.
• Recessive Bilingualism: losing the ability to
communicate in one of the languages.
• Receptive Bilinguals: Individuals who can only
read and listen in the second language
• Productive Bilinguals: Those who can use all
the four skills of language
 Bilingualism & Domains of Use
• Bilingualism constitutes a range of skills,
extending from the monolingual at one
extreme, through the subordinate and
coordinate bilingual, to the compound
bilingual.
• For effective communication the bilingual speaker
needs to control, not only the linguistic code but also
the channel through which the code is actualized. The
speaker is aware of sociolinguistic variables that
control his/her choice of code. Thus the bilingual
individual not only possesses bilingual skills
but also social skills.
 Case Study: A Dominance Configuration of a
Muslim Immigrant in Britain
• Dominance Configuration: a list of domains
that govern the choice of code of a bilingual.
• DOMAIN LANGUAGE
• Family P
P(Punjabi)
• Friendship P A(Arabic)
• Religion A P
E(English)
• Shopping E P
• Work E
 Benefits of bilingualism
• Bilingual speakers are better able to deal with
distractions than those who speak only a single
language, and that may help offset age-related
declines in mental performance, researchers say.
• Research has shown that bilingualism is beneficial for
children’s development and their future. Children
exposed to different languages become more aware of
different cultures, other people and other points of
view. But they also tend to be better than
monolinguals at 'multitasking' and focusing attention,
they often are more precocious readers, and generally
find it easier to learn other languages. Bilingualism
gives individuals much more than two languages!
 Language domain, prestige, globalization and
bilingualism
How do people become bilingual?
People may become bilingual either by acquiring
two languages at the same time in childhood or by learning a second language sometime after
acquiring their first language. Many bilingual people grow up speaking two languages. Often
in America such people are the children of immigrants; these children grow up speaking their
parents' native language in their childhood home while speaking English at school. Many
bilinguals, however, are not immigrants; it is not uncommon for people born in the U.S. to
speak English at school or work and another language at home. Children can also become
bilingual if their parents speak more than one language to them, or if some other significant
person in their life (such as a grandparent or caretaker) speaks to them consistently in
another language. Sometimes a child will grow up in a household in which each parent
speaks a different language; in that case, the child may learn to speak to each parent in that
parent's language. In short, a young child who is regularly exposed to two languages from an
early age will most likely become a fluent native speaker of both languages. The exposure
must involve interaction; a child growing up in an English-speaking household who is exposed
to Spanish only through Spanish-language television won't become a Spanish-English
bilingual, but a child who is regularly spoken to in both English and Spanish will. It is also
possible to learn a second language sometime after early childhood, but the older you get,
the harder it is to learn to speak a new language as well as a native speaker. Many linguists
believe there is a 'critical period' (lasting roughly from birth until puberty )
 Multilingualism

Introduction
 multilingualism vs. bilingualism
Not a minority phenomenon
By contrast monolingualism represents a
special case
Multilingualism & other disciplines.
 Origins of multilingualism: causes &
consequences
 A condition of life of considerable antiquity
 Quranic evidence
 Story from Genesis
 Negative effects of multilingualism, i.e,
multilingualism is divisive & monolingualism is
cohesive
 Cases where common language has not resulted in
any kind of unity.
 Individual vs. societal
multilingualism
 Distinction b/w individual bilingualism &
societal multilingualism
 Connection b/w individual bilingualism &
societal multilingualism
1. Powerful societies force their language upon
the less powerful.
2. A means of enriching children’s development
 Language choice in multilingual
communities
 Switching among languages and varieties
 Not all languages / varieties are regarded as equal
 Multilingualism is not an incidental feature but an organizing force
in every day life
 Monolingualism would be problematic as it is against the norm

Domains of use
A domain is a combination of factors which are believed to
influence choice of code (language, dialect or style) by speakers.
Such factors might include participants (in a conversation), topic
and location.
Family, Friendship, Religion, Employment, education
 Diglossia
Each language serves a specialized function &
is used for particular purposes.
H variety has no native speakers and is learnt
at schools. Used for high functions
L variety is used in low functions
 Language shift & language death
 As a result of forced or voluntary immigration to a
place where it is not possible to maintain one’s
native language.
 Religious & educational background
 Settlement patterns
 Ties with the homeland
 Extent of exogamous marriage
 Attitude of majority & minority language groups
 Government policies concerning language &
education
 Bilingualism and intelligence
• View of emperor Charles 5______one’s
personality broadens with extra languages

• Common observation among those already

bilinguals and social elites
 Weinreich’s point of view
• Problems faced by bilinguals:
• Split national loyalties
• Stuttering
• Emotional difficulties
• Moral depravity
• Left-handedness
• Laziness
• Detrimental consequences for intelligence
• Problems of bilinguals more likely stem from
social factors in bilingual household than from
linguistically driven ‘mental conflict’.
• If bilingual families have heightened level of
social tension this could be indirect
discouragement of bilingualism.
• Families applying ‘one-parent-one-language’
principle to children in an unduly rigid way
can create problems associated with the
growth and use of bilingualism.
 Jespersen’s view
• “It is ,of course, an advantage for a child to be
familiar with two languages: but without doubt
advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too
dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns
either of the two languages as perfectly as he would
have done if he had limited himself to
one….secondly, the brain effort required to master
the two languages instead of one certainly
diminishes the child’s power of learning other
things.”
 Points of interest
• Possibility of a sort of semilingualism

• A limited-capacity model of human

intellectual functioning
 Negative association between
bilingualism and intelligence
• Early studies tended to find such association

• Most of them were conducted in America at

the time of great concern with the flood of
immigrants
 Intelligence testing movement

• An example of the misuse of science allied to

ignorance and prejudice
 ‘objective’ intelligence tests
• Reflected a very culture-bound ideal
• Immigrants especially non-white, non-English
speaking, non-northern European, non-
educated did not fare well
• ‘feeble-minded’ immigrants were mentally
handicapped by their languages
• The greater the use of English, the higher the
measured intelligence
• A well-known study concluded: ‘The use of a
foreign language in the home is one of the
chief factors in producing mental retardation’.
 Study of Wels/English bilngualism
• No IQ difference between urban monolinguals
and bilinguals but a substantial one for rural
children
• Did not take into account obvious social
contact differences between the city and
country dwellers
• Nor occupational and social class variation
among the parents
 Problem of statistical inference
• Has the first caused the second or vice versa

• Is there a third factor which influences both

and thus accounts for their relationship
• The later studies tended to show essentially
no relationship between intelligence and
bilingualism

• Lack of control showed negative association

 Positive relationship between
intelligence and bilingualism
• Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert carefully
control relevant variables in an examination in
which:
ten years old bilingual and bilingual
children took part
all the subjects were from middle class
background
all the bilingual youngsters had equal
proficiency in French and English
 The findings
• The bilinguals were found to out perform there
monolingual counterparts on both verbal and non-
verbal intelligence tests
• They concluded that the bilingual child had ‘mental
flexibility, a superiority in concept formation and a
more diversified set of mental abilities’.
• They also stated that it is not possible from the study
to state whether more intellectual child became
bilingual or bilingualism aided to their intellectual
development.
 Criticism
• The limitations given by Peal and Lambert
themselves

• Generizability of the results

 Restrictions
• Only ‘balanced’ bilinguals
• Questions about representativeness of the
sample of children
• Difficulty of equating home backgrounds
simply by holding socioeconomic status
constant
 example
• Two children of the same sex and age living in the same
village may have fathers who work side by side as
underground miners. One family regularly attends Welsh
chapel and competes in singing and poetry competitions at
local and national level. The miner and his wife send their
bilingual child to a designated bilingual secondary school. The
culture of the second family concerns bingo, the club, discos
and pigeon racing. Their monolingual child attends a non-
Welsh speaking school. For the quantitative researcher, the
children are matched on socio-economic class. In reality the
differences are great.
 The Bilingual Brain
• Co-ordinate bilingualism

• Compound bilingualism
• If one’s first language was Punjabi, and Urdu were
acquired later, then different conceptual systems
might operate for each language. It is co-ordinate
bilingualism.
• if Punjabi and Urdu were acquired concurrently, the
neuropsychological representation of the two
languages could be fused or joined it a compound
system. Here a single conceptualization would
underlie word from both the languages
• Studies of bilingual production and access have been
inconclusive
• There is little support for the idea that different
languages are stored in the brain in essentially
different compartments
• there is a possibility that within some overarching
linguistic-storage unit, there may be subsystems
associated with separate languages.
 Examples of aphasia
• A 44 years old man whose maternal language was
Swiss-German, and who had subsequently acquired
German and French, suffered a stroke. Within a
couple of days he was able to understand all three
varieties, but his speech was severely impaired. He
first recovered productive power in French, then
German, then Swiss-German (in reverse order in
which they were learned). Later, the French faded,
and Swiss German re-emerged as dominant.
• A 75-year old man, a native German speaker
with competence in French and English,
suffered a brain injury which caused him to
mix these varieties (‘I vil home kommen’ for ‘I
want to go home’).
• A Chinese English bilingual who suffered a
brain tumor lost the ability to read and write
in Chinese (his maternal tongue) but retained
it for English.
 Bilingualism and society
• There is a distinction between elite and folk
bilingualism

• In different ages, knowing French or Latin or

Greek in addition to one’s mother tongue was
necessary for educated people.
 Transitional collective bilingualism
• Transitional or impermanent variety is
common in many immigrant contexts.
• It is a way station on the road between two
unilingualisms.
• The classic pattern for newcomers to united
states was bilingualism by the second
generation and English monolingualism by the
third.
 Permanent collective bilingualism
• It remains due to continuing necessity of
different social function and different domain
of use for each language.

• This situation is known as diglossia.

 H and L variety
• High (H) variety reigns in formal and printed
contexts.

• Low (L) variety serves mundane purposes.

Relationship between bilingualism and
diglossia
• Joshua Fishman outlined four possible
interactions:
1. Speech communities with both bilingualism
and diglossia
2. Diglossia without bilingualism
3. Bilingualism without diglossia
4. Neither diglossia nor bilingualism
Types of bilingualism

Presented to: Sir Nazir Malik

Presented by: Mehvish Riaz
ID:090584012
 Types of Bilingualism
• Receptive bilingualism
• Productive bilingualism
• Simultaneous bilingualism
• Successive bilingualism
• Recessive bilingualism
• Additive bilingualism
 Types Conti….
• Subtractive bilingualism
• Co-ordinate bilingualism
• Compound bilingualism
• Subordinate bilingualism
• Enforced bilingualism
• Elitist bilingualism
 Types conti….
• Instructed bilingualism
• Geographically or socially induced
bilingualism
• Early bilingualism
• Late bilingualism
• Natural bilingualism
• Achieved bilingualism
 Receptive vs. Productive
• Receptive bilingualism means a bilingual’s ability
to understand a great deal more in a language
than to express in words.

• Limited opportunity for the child to speak in one

of the two languages.

• May acquire some language passively, but he is

not considered fully or balanced bilingual.
• Productive bilingualism means that the
command of the target language and that
of the native language positively reinforce
each other; deeper understanding and
appreciation of the target culture goes
hand in hand with deeper understanding
and appreciation of the native culture.
• Receptive bilinguals can read and listen
whereas productive bilinguals can read,
write, speak and listen.
 Additive vs. Subtractive
• The first term refers to a process or
educational programme whereby a language
is added to an individual’s existing linguistic
repertoire.

• A situation where an individual's first language

is dominant and prestigious one, and in no
danger of replacement when a second
language is learnt.
• With subtractive or transitional
bilingualism, the second language is learnt
at the expense of the native language; and
target culture assimilation threatens to
replace values and life styles of the native
culture.

• First language is a nonprestigious

language.
• With additive bilingualism, the individual
maintains a strong ethnolinguistic identity
and positive beliefs towards their own
language.

• First language is used without diglossia.

 Coordinate vs. Compound

In co-ordinate bilingualism, children develop

two parallel linguistic systems, so that for any
one word, the child has two signifiers and two
signified.

• Both the languages are independent.

• Learner will have two different mental

representations for the same object.
• In compound bilingualism, children
have only one signified for two
signifiers and so cannot detect the
conceptual differences between the
two languages.

• For compound bilinguals, languages

are interdependent.
• A compound bilingual learns both the
languages in the same context where
they are used concurrently so that there
is a fused representation of the
languages in the brain.

• A single concept with two different verbal

labels.
 Subordinate Bilingualism

• Subtype of co-ordinate bilingualism.

• Interpretation of the words of weaker
language through those of stronger
language.

• Dominant language acts as filter.

 Compound coordi. subordinate
• Set of
meaning One two primary

• Linguistic Two two another

systems
 Simultaneous vs. Successive

• Simultaneous bilingualism applies to children

who develop both languages within almost an
equal timeframe.

• Opportunities to use both languages.

• A similar pattern of language acquisition is

used for each language separately.
• Successive bilingualism applies to children
who are learning a second language after
the first language is established.
• Series of stages to learning a second
language.
• Children who have had little or no
exposure to second language before
entering preschool
 Early vs. Late
• Early bilingualism, in case of a child who
had been in contact with two languages
from birth.

• In case of a child who acquired second

language in early childhood.
• Late bilingualism may be the result of
learning in a natural or artificial
environment.

• Through attending courses

 Natural vs. Achieved
• The first term refers to when the child
acquires two languages from the
speakers around him/her in an
unstructured way. The process involves
no teaching and no learning.
 Enforced vs. Elitist
• Enforced bilingualism develops in
migratory contexts whereas the second
type develops through bilingual
education in the family.
• Elitist bilinguals have a highly developed
language awareness potential which they
can use to a high degree of flexibility in
instructed language learning situation.

• This potential of enforced bilinguals is

lower than that of monolinguals.
 Instructed vs. Socially Induced
• Instructed bilingualism is developed
through the teaching of foreign
languages in the classroom.

• The second type develops because a

person lives in a regional or social
context in which several languages are
spoken
The Bismillah Ceremony of three day Urs of
Hzrat Baba Shah was performed hereby giving
ghusal to the Mazar amidst recitation of
Darood-o-Salam by devotees in hundreds,
says a handout ( The Nation, Lahore, 26
August 1989)
Most of the landholdings in Jhang are
small – with typical Chaudhry toking on
his chillum under a shady tree at his dera
( Herald April, 1991)
 Borrowing
Code Switching
Code Mixing
 Borrowing
The process whereby bilingual speakers
introduce words from one language into
another language, and those loan words
eventually become accepted as an integral
part of the second language.
• Restaurant
• Pizza
• Vodka
 Aspects of Borrowing
• Lexical
• Semantic
• Grammatical
 Code Mixing
• Code Switching is the change of one language
to another within the same utterance or in the
same oral/written text. It is a common
phenomenon in which two or more languages
are used.
• You know, mere ideas change hote rehte hy
 Code switching
The process whereby bilingual or bidialectal
speakers switch back an d forth between one
language or dialect or another within the
same conversation
 Articles of use
…….five motorists armed with pistols, looted
dore Rs 8000 from a guddi shop. ( Article of
use) ( N19 January, 1991)
 Descriptive Labels for People
• In another recent incident, Pervaiz Iqbal was
also looted by three Nauserbaz ( N 24 July 28
1998)
• When at last the army would be told to NAB
the much wanted elements, the latter simply
would not be there an only a few JOOTI
CHORE and MURGHI CHORE type criminals
would come in hands ( M9 July 1990)- Letter
to the editor
 Edibles

• After sometime they again came to the

haleem shop on motorcycles and threw his
two daigs full of haleem on the road. ( N 1
August 1989)
• Of all these old markets, Luxmi Chowk,
perhaps, offers dishes for almost every class of
people ranging from simple Daal Chawal to
roast Chargha ( D/ L 21 January 1989) Edibles
 Law and order situation
• Time was when the Punjab industrialists,
traders and the middle class were the loudest
in condemning Gharaos ( PT 23 July 1989) Law
and Order
• Why can’t our shadies be something like. O.k.
bring in the Dulha and Dulhan, their close
friends and relatives …………..What is this all
about, Dholkies, Mayus, Mehndis, Baraats
and Valimas ( Mag 17- 23 January 1991)
 Marriage/divorce

• Why can’t our shadies be something like. O.k.

bring in the Dulha and Dulhan, their close
friends and relatives …………..What is this all
about, Dholkies, Mayus, Mehndis, Baraats
and Valimas ( Mag 17- 23 January 1991)
 Wallahs

• For some time the pressure to produce its

own plays had been steadily mounting on the
Alhamra Wallahs ( FP/ L 26 September 1991)
Adjectives and Adverbials and verbs are
also used

Adjectives and Adverbials and verbs are also

used.
While negotiating our turn to climb from a
Kucha portion to the Pucca portion of a road,
the driver lost control ………( D 14 November
1986)
Adjectives which function as nouns are
common
• Adjectives which function as nouns are
common
• Another Gora telling us what we are ( FR 20
September 1991)
• He was therefore removed from school and
sent to bicycle mechanic to become his Chotta
( WP 4 October 1991)
As the majority of nationally circulated English
language newspapers in Pakistan are
published in the Punjab, the country’s largest
province in terms of population, Punjabi
borrowings are quite frequent.
Luddi being performed by the students of the
Lahore College for Women on their annual
sports day ( D 9 February 1989)
A borrowing from the category of terms of
gratification which occurs with great
frequency is Muk-Mukao
Finally from the category of religion

Today is Marru which comes after Tarru……….(

PT 6 July 1990)