BILINGUALISM. In many parts of the world people use one language inside the family circle and speak another, some times of a different type, freely and naturally, outside the family circle. Or two languages may exist side by side in the same coun try and be used freely by the inhabitants both at home and outside the home. One may develop into a lingua franca (q.v.) and the other remain a local dialect. The conflict between localization and unification goes on everywhere and affects language as a social instrument and institution. Inside a society, if education is the privilege of the few, there will be found such differences between the speech of the educated and the uneducated classes as to pro duce a kind of bilingualism. A man may write like an angel and talk like poor Poll. The purists in Athens and Bengal go to classical models while the speech of the people—living—subject to the life of the people--develops independently. Then there are cases of politically advanced communities where two distinct languages are spoken in the same area, are taught in the schools and are recognized for official purposes. There are cases, too, un happily not infrequent in history where a ruling people has thrust its language on a conquered country. Eut so closely is language bound up with national and religious life that the former language will be kept alive by patriotism.
The study of bilingualism in the strict sense involves, there fore, scrutiny of its distribution, of the conditions in which it occurs, of the nature and extent of the effects which it produces on the phonetic and structural systems of both languages, the familial and the external. Regard must be had to the conditions in which the second or external language is acquired and used, to the linguistic affinities of the two languages and to the psycho logical, economic and political conditions of contact. Educational and psychological problems are involved.
Finnish speech is in touch with Russian and Swedish, and Rus sian in turn farther East is in contact with Mongol and Chinese. In India, Brahui, a Dravidian language is ringed round with Iranian tongues, and in the south the Dravidian languages en counter Indo-Aryan languages along a great frontier. There are Dravidian areas surrounded or in touch with Austric (Munda) speech. Assam and Burma, too, have linguistic frontiers. Austric speech meets Papuan in New Guinea. In American conditions there are people such as the Mayas who are even trilingual for they speak Maya in their homes, learn Spanish in the mission schools and use English in trade.
The form of the family, the modes of marriage observed, polygamy, matrilocal and patrilocal marriage, induce variations in linguistics as in other social matters.
Marriage with strangers may be allowed, encouraged or, more usually, forbidden and disliked. Some societies are exclusive, jealous of strangers, resistant to new ideas. Others, those in which bilingualism flourishes, are willing, even eager to seek inter course with .others. Here and there occur special cases where only historical knowledge can explain a difficult linguistic phe nomenon as among the Caribs who killed off the Arawak men and took the women as captives. The women spoke Arawak, their own language, and taught it to their daughters, but the boys were taken by their fathers often at an early age for long voyages and expeditions and so learnt Carib. In Burma mixed marriages of Burmese women with Chinese men are known and the girls are brought up as Burmese while the boys follow the father.
Slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in the course of millennia bring about the most profound structural changes. Thus a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of a language, reducing its final syllables to zero. One of the most potent causes of unsettling a language is any widespread bilingualism, whether open or, as is often the case, secret and un suspected.
Certain languages have structural features due to the suggestive influence of neighbouring languages.
How great the influence of one language on another may be, even when the two belong to different language families, is shown by the present condition of Finnish, Estonian and Magyar and Finno-Ugrian languages. It is said that a reader familiar with other European speech will find nothing fundamentally original in the syntax of the sentences of a journal in these languages, apart from a few idiomatic expressions.
Words have an association with other words in their pristine vocabulary and lose this value at least in part when adopted into a new home where they acquire association with another and gen erally very different set of ideas and thus gain a new meaning.