Päivitetty 17.6.2004  –  Palautteet

Virittäjä-lehti  >  Hakemistot  >  Kirjoitukset ja tiivistelmät: 2/2004 (108)

Simultaneous bilingualism in infants

Bilingualism is present in practically every country in the world. Although many studies have been made on child bilingualism, none have focused on child bilingualism in Estonian and Finnish, two genetically closely related languages.

The article examines the simultaneous acquisition of Estonian and Finnish in Finland by a brother and sister in a bilingual family in which the parents practise a one-person/one-language strategy. The data comprises written diary notes beginning at age 0;6 and tape recordings at age 1;2–4;0 (altogether 36 hours). The tape recordings include monolingual contexts for each language and a bilingual Estonian-Finnish context. The study is a descriptive and diachronic study monitoring the acquisition of two languages in infants. Language development and the differentiation of the two languages in the early years are analysed by examining vocabulary acquisition, the acquisition of grammatical categories and changes in the children’s environment. The writer also discusses how the development of bilingualism is affected by background factors, languages spoken in the children’s environment and relationships with other people.

Bilingualism is often considered a danger to language acquisition because of language mixing phenomena, i.e. bi- and/or unidirectional influences between languages in a multilingual environment. The study results show that changes in the children’s language environment (e.g. trips, visiting friends) had a stronger influence on their communication before age 3;0, although such changes do not explain all the language mixing observed. Bidirectional code mixing at age 2;9–4;0 may be one typological characteristic of Estonian-Finnish bilingualism and is probably caused by genetic closeness and functional differences.

Sirje Hassinen