Contents › Section 6: Bilingualism, language acquisition and language learning › answer 5 of 27
Is it true that one can be bilingual in any pair of languages or are some languages 'incompatible' with one another when learned in childhood?
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There is no limit on how similar or different two languages have to be for bilingualism. The historical experience suggests that this is not even a very good question to ask. There are millions of people bilingual in languages with completely different lexical bases, different syntax and morphology as well as phonetics.
Also keep in mind that:
- Knowing a language is a not an on / off state. It is a continuous development and changes over a person's lifetime.
- Multilingual people most often don't know both languages in the same way because they learned them in different contexts.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).