The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism

The ability to speak two or more languages is a common human experience, whether for children born into bilingual families, young people enrolled in foreign language classes, or mature and older adults learning and using more than one language to meet life’s needs and desires. This Handbook offers a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized survey of research into individual bilingualism, comprising the learning, use and, as the case may be, unlearning of two or more spoken and signed languages and language varieties. A wide range of topics is covered, from ideologies, policy, the law, and economics, to exposure and input, language education, measurement of bilingual abilities, attrition and forgetting, and giftedness in bilinguals. Also explored are cross- and intra-disciplinary connections with psychology, clinical linguistics, second language acquisition, education, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, contact linguistics, and sign language research.

Author Biography

Annick De Houwer is Professor of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism at the Universität Erfurt, Germany. Her book The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth (Cambridge, 1990) constituted pioneering work in bilingual acquisition, and her 2009 textbooks Bilingual First Language Acquisition and An Introduction to Bilingual Development are used all over the world. Lourdes Ortega is Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Georgetown University, Washington DC. A widely published scholar, she is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of L2 instruction in 2000, her best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and for championing a bilingual turn in SLA.