Multilingualism

Bilingual Upbringing

A historically grown collection on bilingual childhood, terminology, opportunities and experience.

Migrated collection: This area preserves earlier texts on bilingual and multilingual upbringing and is technically integrated into the new site structure.

This website is concerned with bilingual or multilingual upbringing. Most people know families in which children grow up with more than one language. Often one parent has a different linguistic background and speaks their own native language with the child.

But there are also families in which children additionally grow up with a language that is not dominant in the country and that neither parent speaks as a native language. This rarer situation was one of the original focal points of the website.

Pros & cons

Opportunities, fears and typical objections surrounding bilingual upbringing.

Terminology

Monolingual, bilingual, multilingual: basic concepts.

Categories

Different forms and levels of multilingual competence.

Literature

Historical reading recommendations from the original collection.