MULTILIGUALISM AS A RESOURCE

Multilingualism?helps an individual to see the same reality from several perspectives, this enhances the cognitive ability of understanding the universe with compound clarity.

It is the use of more than one?language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber?monolingual?speakers in the?world's population.?More than half of all?Europeans?claim to speak at least one language other than their?mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness.?Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called?polyglots.

Multilingual speakers have?acquired?and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called?first language?(L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal education, by?mechanisms?about which scholars disagree. Children acquiring two languages natively from these early years are called?simultaneous bilinguals. It is common for young simultaneous bilinguals to be more proficient in one language than the other.

People who speak more than one language have been reported to be more adept at language learning compared to monolinguals

?Individuals who are highly proficient in two or more languages have been reported to have enhanced executive function or even have reduced-risk for dementia. More recently, however, this claim has come under strong criticism with repeated failures to replicate.?One possible reason for this discrepancy is that bilingualism is rich and diverse; bilingualism can take different forms according to the context and geographic location in which it is studied.?Yet, many prior studies do not reliably quantify samples of bilinguals under investigation.?An emerging perspective is that studies on bilingual and multilingual cognitive abilities need to account for validated and granular quantifications of language experience in order to identify boundary conditions of possible cognitive effects.

Source: Wikipedia; TED ED.