Linguistic aspects of bilingualism involve three main phenomena: integration, interference, and code-switching. It is estimated that more than a few generations are required for integration to take place. Integration can take place at almost all lingu...
Linguistic aspects of bilingualism involve three main phenomena: integration, interference, and code-switching. It is estimated that more than a few generations are required for integration to take place. Integration can take place at almost all linguistic levels, but integration at the lexical level is most prevalent. It appears to occur at morphological, syntactic, and phonological level, in decreasing order.
In contrast, interference is an unstable, short-term phenomenon in language con-tact situation. It may arise at all linguistic levels, the most persistent and subtle of which appear to arise at semantic and cultural levels.
Code-switching can be seen as a verbal strategy, by means of which a bilingual speaker adjusts himself to the situational needs. It can also provide him with rhetorical devices, which are lacking in monolinguals. Or, it may be seen as a sort of foregrounding, by means of which a speaker tries to highlight or foreground a specific point he wants to emphasize, by putting a word or phrase in a place away from its normal context.
Cartesian linguistics appears unsuitable for dealing with bilingualism, since it presupposes a homogeneous speech community and deals with an ideal speaker/hearer, functioning in such a society, whereas a bilingual speaker, by definition, functions in a heterogeneous speech community and is usually, but not always, far from being an ideal speaker/hearer.
Sociolinguistics appears to be a much better model to deal with bilingualism. However, even sociolinguistics alone seems inadequate to a full understanding of bilingualism. Only an interdisciplinary approach-linguistic, psychological, sociological as well as neurolinguistic-appears to be able to fully deal with bilingualism.