V61.0018 Bilingualism
Philipp Angermeyer
Spring 2006
New York City is one of the most multilingual cities in the world. Furthermore, most people in the world today grow up speaking multiple languages. In this class, students will be introduced to linguistic and social issues that are raised by the phenomenon of multilingualism. We will read and discuss case studies of different multilingual communitiesin New York and elsewhere to discover the ways in which people use multiple languages in their daily lives. We will study how different patterns of multilingual language use relate to the particular social contexts in which they arise, and we will investigate what this can tell us more generally about language and about questions of community and identity.
The course will be divided into four main units which cover the following topics:- The Social Setting of Multilingualism
- Multilingualism in NYC
- Attitudes towards bilingualism in the US and elsewhere
- Diglossia
- Bilingual education
- The Bilingual Speaker
- Bilingual first language acquisition
- Bilingual parent-child interaction
- Second language acquisition
- Neurolinguistic perspectives on bilingualism, bilingual aphasia
- First language attrition
- Bilingual Language Use
- The grammar of codeswitching
- Discourse functions of codeswitching
- Codeswitching and language attitudes
- Blurring the boundaries between languages
- Linguistic Consequences of Bilingualism
- Language shift
- Language change
- Contact languages
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