ipl-logo

Being Bilingual Essay

1031 Words5 Pages

A person that speaks two languages, especially with equal fluency, is called bilingual. Those who speak more than two languages are called multilingual. Nowadays, many persons use two languages, or three in some cases, because societies are evolving and knowing many languages is more than necessary. Bilingualism is seen as brain-sharpening benefit, and parents encourage children to acquire two languages in the interest of a properly brain development. Bilingual experience is a significant theme of this paper and numerous things must be stated.
Learning new languages and being bilingual or multilingual lead to new insights. A large number of advantages can be described like developing better cognitive functions. Another advantage of being bilingual …show more content…

Anna Wierzbicka, the author of the article “Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experience” is right about the fact that “the vocabulary of emotions is undoubtedly different from language to language” because it depends on how every language expresses certain feelings. Many languages have certain words with no match in another language, like Anna Wierzbicka says: “for example the death of a loved person, can be interpreted by a speaker of Polish through the conceptual category of ‘nieszcze˛s´cie’ and by the speaker of English through the conceptual category of ‘grief’”. Being bilingual suppose switching from a language to another by taking in consideration the culture of that particular language and the way that feelings can be expressed using it. When bilingual people describe emotions, they tend to use words or expressions from their mother tongue because they find no match from the second language. For instance, an Italian who lives in United States of America, although he knows English, he will often use the expression “mamma mia” due to the fact that he finds in his mother tongue a better correspondent for his feeling. Although he can say another expression in English, not every time can be psychologically

More about Being Bilingual Essay

Open Document