The acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts

Abstract

As the field of bilingual acquisition has made significant advances in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the acquisition of Chinese languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts. This article serves a dual purpose: (1) to discuss some theoretical and methodological issues in bilingual acquisition with special reference to Chinese languages as target languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts; and (2) to highlight the important contributions made by the five articles in this volume, with some commentary on the issues raised by each study.The five articles to be discussed present highly original and dynamic research involving the acquisition of a Chinese language in children acquiring two or more languages simul-taneously from birth. The children featured in these studies come from three very different speech communities: Hong Kong, Australia and Paraguay. In most cases, either Mandarin or Cantonese (referred to collectively as Chinese here) is paired with English, with one case study also involving Taiwanese and Spanish. The combination of a Chinese language with English or another European language (such as Spanish in the case of Paraguay) being acquired by children in childhood raises new and challenging questions about bilingual development.The diversity in the backgrounds of the children featured in this volume provides a window into the complexity of language acquisition across different bilingual and multilingual contexts. These studies provide important results that future work on bilingual development of a Chinese language will have to take into consideration. They are also valuable in contributing to the fast growing body of longitudinal corpus-based studies by expanding the empirical base of bilingual acquisition and addressing theoretical issues of interest to the field at large.