Lana Privitera is the proud Mom of a fun-loving, bilingual "chatterboy" that likes to spice his speeches in English with long-winded Spanish words. Her goal for 2008 is to pack also some French and Italian in his very expandable 3.5 year old brain. Lana still qualifies as a SAHM but uses her "spare" time working as a watercolor artist and Spanish/art teacher.
When talking about multilingualism there is such an abundance of terms used to
describe a family linguistic status that is quite normal for the un‐initiated to become
confused.
Today I wanted to try to clarify some of those terms for you.
Mother language
: the language you learn from birth –be it the local language or not.
Majority/Local/Native language
: the language spoken in the country you live in.Minority/Target Language: a language that isn’t the Local Language. It could be one
of the parent’s original native language or a Foreign Language introduced at school,
or even a language one or both of the parents speak at home even though it isn’t
their native language.
OPOL: “One Parent One Language”: A household where 2 languages are spoken to
the child. It can be 2 Minority languages or the Local language plus a Minority
language.
Bilingual
: A person fluent in 2 languages.
Multilingual
: A person fluent in 3 or more languages.