Bilingualism and Multilingualism: Evaluation of language policies

Abstract

This paper focuses on the process of bilingualism and multilingualism, which are highly complex, multidimensional linguistic, psychological, and social behaviours. The growth of interest in multilingual acquisition in recent years has challenged some of the existing methods and premises that were widely taken in bilingualism and second-language acquisition. Multilingualism usually refers to a speaker's knowledge and efficiency of using three or more languages while bilingualism is the sociolinguist's term to suggest a speaker's knowledge and use of more than one, i.e. two, languages - their mother tongue and an additional language. This ensures that an individual understands the languages separately, in separate environments, and maintains this ideologies after gaining both.