The Pros And Cons Of Growing Up In A Multilingual Environment

Demand for speakers of more than one language is increasing, which in turn is driving up the amount of bilingual and multilingual speakers. English as the prominent language of business across the world, is in fact, spoken by more people as a second language than as a first language ‘native speakers’. It is also estimated that there are just as many monolingual children in the world as there are bilingual if not slightly more. This paper examines how children acquire and learn more than one language in bilingual and multilingual environments, and probes whether or not there are any consequences being brought up in a multilingual environment. In addition, this paper looks at the cognitive benefits and disadvantages of being bilingual, and how it has positives effects on a child’s upbringing.

Growing-up in a Multilingual Environment

Growing-up in multilingual environment is a privilege for some but more often than not it is a necessity to be bilingual. Mulitilingisium in homes across the world is increasing the amount of people especially children who are capable to converse efficiently and effectively in more than one language. It has been estimated that there are just as many multilingual children as monolingual in the world today, if not more

Bilingualism not only helps with cognitive development, but also contributes to many social benefits, such as communication where they live and communication while travelling or placed abroad. Even though bilingual people accumulate vocabulary in the individual languages slower than that of a monolingual person, it is still possible to build a large lexicon for everyone. Further studies could look at how children acquire language when they are immersed in three languages. Perhaps, like people who learn two languages have smaller lexicons than those of monolinguals, multilingual would again have a small