This is the old outdated version of "Bilingual Upbringing
of Children in the Home", please go to the new version!
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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Please send me mail,
telling me what you think about this page and how I might improve
it.
last update: Sep 23, 2002