Being a bilingualism is a person’s ability to communicate in two languages. In most cases, bilingualism view has not always been clear. According to Cate de Langer in the “my second mind”, the traditional view of bilingualism was that it would influence the child by making them unable to internalize other languages. On the other hand, it has been argued that bilingualism hinders children development aspects and results to lower IQ. We are going to focus the Cate de Langer on bilingualism and the “Vanishing Voices” by Rhymer based on the benefits of bilingual, multilingual, endangered and dominant languages whereby every language is thought to have its own window in the world.
To begin with, according to recent surveys, the above fears now seem unjustified. “Bilingual people have the tendency of having smaller vocabularies in every language as compared to their monolingual peers. In most cases they are slow as they try to reach out for the correct word as they name objects” (Cate de. Langer ??).According to a survey in the 1960s however, a person’s ability to be a bilingualism has not been proven to stunt the child’s development. When factors that affect performance such as education and the socioeconomic status were being controlled on the contrary, it was found out that the bilingual individuals outperformed the monolingual individuals in a total of 15 non verbal and verbal tests.
Bilingual is said to wedge open the languages learning window. Researchers was looking into the bilingual benefits. as a matter of fact, the more they looked the more the number of benefits they found out. Some of the benefits are found to span broad skills range. Bilinguals performance has always been described as an improvement in what is commonly known as brains “executive system”; In a class perspective for example, they are good at focusing on the grammar and probably ignore words meanings .Another executive skill is the person`s ability to jump between many tasks without any confusion. Bilinguals have been found to be better in such kinds of challenges as well. There is another example that bilinguals perform best, is in the activities that require categorizing of objects. For instance, “when it comes to describing an object`s shape or considering object`s color, they do it without making errors” (Cate de. Langer ??)
The “Vanishing Voices” discusses the loss of language and what were the causes as well as the importance of a dominant language. The author argue that linguistic diversity is dying. In the last 500 years, almost a half of all the known languages have disappeared. However, this speed is really accelerating due to the global communication advent. “Vanishing Voices” has been written on a purpose to preserve endanger languages. Evidently, language has been misunderstood and ignored for a long time. There are many reasons for ignoring the extinction of language (rhymer 333). To begin with. It’s incorrect that many languages existence is a barrier to modernization, economic development and communication too.