Bilingual Code Mixing

The developments of the past few years have made theoretical linguists interested in the potentials of bilingual s speech for the theoryof language.The problem area which has attracted the largest number of studies relates to the question of whether bilingual children posses a singlesystem for their languages or two different systems are at work. A possible answer to this question can be found by looking at the language use of bilingual children regarding their language mixing.Bilingual children’s codemixing in correlation with a variety of linguistic elements has been explored to find the reasons for such a phenomenon. Code mixing used to be taken as an argument in favor of the UnitaryLanguage System Hypothesis. However, recent studies questioned the validity of this hypothesis and argued that code mixing is a normal part of bilingual development,and bilingual children have good reasons to code mix. Since there are certain limitations in these studies, further investigation seems to be necessary.

Keywords:

Bilingualism , Code mixing , Code switching , Language learning , UnitaryLanguage System Hypothesis