Essay About Bilingualism

With globalization and population growth in the world, there have occurred many societies and cultures out of human-beings distinction as well as many different languages within those cultures. For this reason, families have become multicultural and multilingual with parents grown up in separate cultures and within different languages resulting to have bilingual children such as Turkey which is a good context for those families. However, one can still set no exact definition of bilingualism with the elaborated meaning on the concept. As Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty (2006) states, bilingualism is “proficiency in and use of two or more languages by an individual; the term does not always imply an equally high level of proficiency in all the relevant

Back then, people believed that they should not get their children to learn a second language at the same time with their mother tongue because it might cause them to have confusion in terms of linguistic properties and have difficulty in cognitive development (Diaz, 1983). Today, people still believe that bilingual individuals may be isolated from both societies if they acquire two languages simultaneously. For instance, Turkish people who have been living in Germany for years have bilingual children. They are quite much affected by German culture and language. So, one can say that they get isolated by being bilingual in a sense. Other disadvantages of bilingualism are having problems in finding one’s identity and having confusion about their own culture because they are exposed to another culture and language. As an example, a member of Turkish society may have some dualities while learning English because we are not used to speaking second languages. Thus, this member might not have the opportunity to use the target language in Turkish context. For this, he or she will encounter cultural and linguistic identity