Entry 2 : What is Multilingualism and Bilingualism

An individual who speaks multiple different languages is called Multilingualism. According to (Vince, 2016), approximately 60 to 75 percent of the people speaks more than one language and some countries consist of multiple official national languages. (Vince,2016) also stated that multilingualism provides health benefits such as faster recovery for mental illness such as strokes and dementia. It's not possible to decipher the rules of the language in a short period of time and render it understandable.

"At the current rate of one a  fortnight, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century."                                -Gaia Vince, 2016

In other country especially Britain and US, bilingual, speaking two languages fluently, was harmful to health and to society among children. It stated that bilingual children would have lower intelligence, low self-esteem, behave deviant ways, split personality and becoming schizophrenic. Thus, it discourage immigrant parent from using their mother tongue when communicating with their children. Apparently, bilingual children are did better than monolingual, speaks in one language, in verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests (Vince, 2016).

Multilingualism causes split personality due to the fact that different language causes an individual to picture their thoughts differently. For example, if individual spoken in Russian, it will picture themselves in Moscow while if spoken in Chinese, it will picture Hong Kong or Taiwan. Susan Ervin-Tripp, a psycholinguistics, tested Japanese-English women by asking them to finish sentences in different language. As the result, every sentences ended differently (Vince, 2016).

According to Jubin Abutalebi, a neuropsychologist, bilingual people have more grey matter, a major component of the brain which involved in muscle control and sensory perception, than monolinguals. 

"Bilinguals exercise their executive control all the time because their two languages are constanly competing for attention."                                                                                                                                               -Gaia Vince, 2016

Bibliography:

Vince G. (2016). The Amazing Benefits of Being a Bilingual. [online] BBC. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160811-the-amazing-benefits-of-being-bilingual [Accessed: 21 June 2017]