Language and Identity in Childhood: The Interconnected Role of Family, School and Society.

This work aims at pointing out how different kinds of bilingualism exist, mainly due to different cultural, family and identity backgrounds that exist or coexist in the same cultural environment. Firstly, this work focuses on how bilingualism spread worldwide, how this became a diffused phenomena and how globalization played a big role in its evolution. Secondly, after a few definitions and factors to its advantage, we focused on the different types of bilingualism. It was stated that bilingualism presents many advantages for the individual, contrary to former beliefs. It then goes on to point out the different environments that play a huge role in the child’s development of the languages. Not always the school environment takes the right measures in helping a bilingual child the way he deserves to be followed. Moreover, parents are definitely the biggest influence in a child's life, so their approach to the language is crucial for the child’s development. The third chapter focuses on interviews made on bilingual people of different ages in order to understand how different stimuli, context and approaches might completely change one’s identity and usage of the language, and also how an individual might end up expressing himself. The work concludes by underlying such differences and stating that the initial approach in the first few years of a child’s life is crucial for its life long maintenance.