Bilingualism - agnes lam

bilingualism refers to the phenomenon of competence and communication in two languages.the above definitions
An ability or psychological state in the individual has been referred to as bilingualism- Hamers and blanc 2000.
Monolingual or communicative norms: do we measure the competencies of bilingual persons against the respective competencies of monolingual persons? If so, we end up with labelling some bilingual as perfect bilingual (as small minority) and others as imperfect bilinguals the vast majority.another approach is not to apply monolingual norms in measuring bilingual abilities but just to evaluate the communicative competence of the bilingual as a whole Grosjean 1912.
Apart from bilingual abilities involving individuals may also have bidialectal or biscriptural abilities within one language.
A final definitional issue concerns the relationship between bilingualism and multilingualism.discussions of bilingualism often include multilingual contexts, because in many multilingual societies there are more bilingual than multilingual individuals.
the study of language switching milroy and muysken 1995 is the research on biculturality, the abilty to alternate to alternate between two cultures.they develop negative attitudes towards their own languages in the process of becoming bilingual, then it is called subtractive bilingualism.Some researchers have related these positive and negative attitudes to cognitive advantages and disadvantages(hamers and blanc 2000)