What happens when multilinguals shift language? The process of language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is when a community of speakers of a language shifts to speaking a completely different language, usually over an extended period of time. From a historical perspective, this happened for example when in the now France shifted […]
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Language scenarios for multilingual children growing up abroad
There are numerous language scenarios for multilingual children living abroad, i.e. outside of both, or one of their parents countries of provenance (or origin), since there are many different degrees of fluency for the single languages spoken at home, language preferences, and languages might be mixed within the home. Parents might speak the community and/or […]
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Plurilingual and Multilingual
WHY PLURILINGUAL? WHY MULTILINGUAL?… In addition to bilingual or bilingualism, which are terms extensively used in the past 50ish years, the terms multilingualism and plurilingualism are increasingly used as (quasi-)synonyms, but they are not… The term of plurilingual is rather used to define a person, whereas the term of multilingual is used to define a country or […]
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Research Projects about Bi- and Multilingualism
Research projects (past and present) Here you can find a list of projects around plurilingual (or multilingual) living. I will update it regularly. If you want me to add your project or a project you consider important, please mail me at info@UtesInternationalLounge.com or leave a comment with the name and link to the project site in […]
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5 Stages of Additional Language Acquisition
When children learn another language after having acquired their first language or languages, they go through different stages that can vary from child to child and depend of how similar the additional language is to those the children already know. This infographic shows 5 stages that 3 to 8 year olds can go through when […]
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