ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at presenting a general overview of the ways in which children can acquire two (or more) languages. The data mentioned here are taken from some of the studies listed in Chapter 2. In virtually all cases the children studied acquired their languages simultaneously from birth. But those children who acquired more than two languages (e.g. Oksaar 1970; Murrell 1966; Hoffmann 1985) were not necessarily infant bilinguals in all their languages. For instance, my daughter Cristina had already started to speak Spanish and German when she came into contact with English at the age of two and a half. Her brother, three years younger, did hear English spoken around him (e.g. from TV, radio, his sister’s friends) from birth, although English was not spoken in the home by any of the family members. So Cristina could be classed ‘infant bilingual’ in Spanish and German and ‘child bilingual’ with respect to English, whereas in Pascual’s case the distinction is less clear-cut; one might call him an ‘infant trilingual’, although the development of his three languages did not proceed in a parallel fashion. It is quite clear that the individual circumstances of bilingual language acquisition must be at least slightly different in the case of almost every infant/child bilingual/trilingual, and that many of them will not fit perfectly into any descriptive category.
