Advantages and Disadvantages of Bilingualism

Bilingualism has been a hotly-debated issue in the fields of second language acquisition, linguistics, and cognitive and social sciences. One of the concerns about bilingualism on which also a lot of discussions and research has been carried out is the question whether being a bilingual puts an individual at an advantageous or disadvantageous position. From this perspective, developments in the field divided the literature into three chronological phases in terms of the effects that bilingualism exerts on individuals: the period of negative effects, the period of neutral effects and the period of positive effects (Baker, 2000). Of these three views the one which is now held by researchers and specialists in the field is the last one that posits that bilingualism has no negative effects; on the contrary it has certain advantages for individuals. Nevertheless, although we know and accept that bilingualism has impressive positive effects on bilinguals, there also some disadvantages that being a bilingual might give way to. In the following paper you will find a concise summary of advantages and disadvantages of being a bilingual.

Baker and Jones (1998) maintain that there are three kinds of benefits of bilingualism these are communication advantages, cultural advantages and cognitive advantages. In terms of communication advantages they state that being a bilingual enables individuals to form strong bonds with their family members and thus helps them to bridge the gap that is possible to exist between generations. Another communication advantage they mention is that being able to switch from one language to another, bilinguals can be more “attuned” to communicative needs of other parties. This is believed to be the reason for bilinguals’ being more “emphatic” listeners. Baker and Jones indicate that cultural advantage of bilingualism is that it provides people with cultural information from two distinct societies.

 It is emphasized that bilingualism opens up new worlds in individuals’ mind which brings a feeling of partnership emanating from the shared languages. As to cognitive advantages of bilingualism Baker and Jones denotes that being a bilingual brings “creative thinking, flexibility and elaboration in thinking”. Baker (2000) also states that bilinguals have superiority in concept formation compared to monolinguals.