advantages of being bilinqual

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Bilingualism is rather a wide-spread phenomenon nowadays. The main reason to the spread of it is a high level of immigrations in modern world. Nearly all countries in the world contain linguistic minorities—small groups of people within a community or country those are different because of the language they use [5, p.512]. In some cases when the minorities are relatively large the country usually has more than one official language: Belgium, Belarus and so on [4, p101]. What does it really mean to be bilingual? Bilingualism is the ability to use two languages with equal fluency and to sound like a native in both [1, p.134]. Young children are naturally designed to acquire what ever languages they are regularly exposed to. Although adults can study a second language to a high, even fluent level, they rarely manage to avoid a foreign accent. That’s why true bilingualism has to start early in life. And one doesn’t really need to be good at languages to be bilingual. The languages you speak are closely bound up with your sense of identity and how you view the world. Being bilingual, multilingual or monolingual can affect the life of a person, his or her networks of friends and acquaintances, schooling, employment, marriage, preferred area of residence, travel and thinking. Even where two languages are quite similar and one can function perfectly in either of them, things feel different in different languages [2, p.367-368]. It’s rare to come across people who are not glad to be bilingual. And this fact has real grounds to stand on. So what are the possible advantages of being bilingual? To start with I’d like to say that bilingualism can increase one’s opportunities and choice. For much of the twentieth century bilingualism was seen as a potential deficit: in thinking, character formation and not least in education. But in recent decades the dominant international
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