Unit 1 - Task 2 - Adopting a critical position towards bilingualism

Step 3 Implications of being bicultural and/or bicultural

Introduction

Many countries face the situation where many languages coexist. In countries like Colombia, languages such as indigenous live with Spanish, so communities and people must learn the dominant language of the country. And so, many people are bicultural and bilingual at the same time. Let’s discuss a bit about these terms and their extent.

Differences

Culture and language are often related but one cannot just separate them. A culture is influenced by its language and a language is influenced by its culture. But they do have differences. An indigenous kid that grows up in his/her native context will learn a mother tongue, but once it moves to a “big city”, he or she will need to start speaking the dominant language, Spanish in the case of Colombia.

Now, this person can share the culture s/he knows, with the new one. There is new food, perhaps new ways of transportation, and forms of communicating the same s/he already knows.

Immigrants o many places or countries face different scenarios of culture and language sharing or discrepancies. A lot of Colombian people travel every year to countries like Mexico, Chile, Brazil, or USA.

In the case of Spanish-speaker countries, the individual now is bicultural, but not bilingual, although the differences in terminology and/or accents. But, when moving to a country like Brazil or USA, now the person must turn bilingual in many cases, if is his/her desire achieving better job opportunities and access to health insurance policies and so on. There are countries like Japan that are not flexible in matters like language, you learn Japanese, or you cannot work.

This is the reason of why many neighborhoods around the globe are there, with punctual places dedicated to certain nationalities, e.g., “the Chinese neighborhood”.

 

Conclussions

Being bicultural or bilingual can be done at different extents. People have different fluencies in the languages they speak, it all depends on the needs of language faced daily. There are people who moved to USA from Latinamerica, at a very young age, and English becomes his(her main language and statrs losing vocabulary in L1 as part of the process of being less in contact with L1 and more in depth with L2.

The important thing here is, to respect all aspects of culture and language people have, language is important to everybody and an individual that learns a new language is also learning a new culture.

By Ruben Dario Buitrago

Dulis Valencia

Colombian Education: 2022