This is the old outdated version of "Bilingual Upbringing of Children in the Home", please go to the new version! E6
Bilingual Upbringing - of Children in the Home


Introduction:

Instead of "Bilingual" in the title I should have better used "Multilingual", because I don't want to expel those families who raise there children in more than two languages. But as the term "bilingual" is used more or less as a synonym to "multilingual", I submit to the general usage.

Intuitively, being bilingual means for most people "having a native-speaker-like control of two languages", i.e. that he or she can be taken for a native speaker in both languages by corresponding native speakers. I think this is a rather strong concept and doesn't meet reality very seldom. It is the highest possible level of bilingualism and can be seen as an ideal. Such people are sometimes referred to as being equilingual.

There are (at least) two nice homepages about this topic available on the net. One is of special interest to me, because it is about Bilingual Parenting in a Foreign Language. You want to know, why I am personally interested in this site, then have a look at our Family Background at this side. What I haven't found so far is such a homepage in German, concerning the German/Any-language pairs, e.g. German/English, German/French, aso. So writing a German version of these pages will be one of my tasks.

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last update: Sep 23, 2002