(ELI5) when babies are raised with bilingual families, are they learning it as just one jumbled language, or as two separate languages?

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Also would it become difficult to discern and seperate them when they join school for example, and interact with people that only speak one

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Anonymous 0 Comments

When babies are extremely young and learning the two langauges, it’s a bit of a jumble. But babies will eventually figure out that certain words are grouped with other words. And more important and telling, they’ll figure out that certain grammar is associated with certain words, and not other words.

One of the very common misconceptions about language is that there’s a 1:1 correspondence of words between languages. That is to say, they think that they can hear a word in another language, look it up in a dictionary, and get an equivalent word out, then translate a language that way. And it’s just not true. Grammars can be extremely different.

So, if you get a kid who’s learning say, English and Latin then the kid is going to learn, hey wait. I mark subjects and objects in a totally different way for these words than those words. So… these words follow this set of rules where I need word order to mark subject and object. But then, with these other words, I need to decline the noun, and the sentence word order is much more flexible.

By doing this, kids get an intuitive understanding that there are two languages going on.

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