Not all bilingual speakers are the same. Firstly, according to Barto-Sisamout and Nicol, “because language is intimately tied to culture and one’s sense of group, bilingual people may have a more complex and multifaceted sense of self and group than monolinguals.” The cultures, as well as language structures (for example, grammar, word order, and parts of speech), related to different languages are all unique, with their own similarities and differences; bilingual speakers will engage with and relate very different concepts in their understanding of two languages. Though these definitions are flexible, and their names tend to vary among researchers, linguists may classify bilingual speakers as coordinate, compound, or subordinate. Coordinate bilingualism usually occurs when speakers grew up learning two languages, and they interact with each one as its own concept. Compound bilingual speakers generally relate their languages in such a way that they understand the ideas communicated by different words as a whole. They understand their languages distinctly but do not fully separate their messages from each other. With subordinate bilingualism, speakers learn one language after childhood and in a separate context from the first. The order in which languages are learned is also considered: speakers can be simultaneously or sequentially bilingual, meaning they learned their languages at the same time or in different stages of their lives. I would not classify myself as bilingual – I still sometimes speak unnaturally, pause too often as I think of words, and have a much smaller vocabulary and some grammar errors in Spanish. However, these classifications encouraged me to think more expansively about bilingualism – I am curious to learn about how proficiency levels are determined, and I will further investigate acquisition processes to understand how I might achieve bilingual proficiency.
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