The status of the “weaker” language in unbalanced French/German bilingual language acquisition

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the status of the so-called “weaker” language, French, in French/German bilingual first language acquisition, using data from two children from the DuFDE-corpus (see Schlyter, 1990a), Christophe and François. Schlyter (1993, 1994) proposes that the “weaker” language in the unbalanced children she studied has the status equivalent to that of a second language (L2). I will verify this assumption on the basis of certain grammatical phenomena, such as the use of subject clitics, null subjects and negation, with respect to which L1 and L2 learners show different developmental patterns. The results indicate that the “weaker” language of the children analyzed in this study cannot be interpreted as an L2. Both children behave predominantly like monolingual and balanced bilingual L1 learners in both languages.