Bilingualism REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

pronunciation, in practice a dialect can usually be identified by the accent of its speakers as well as by distinctive words, usages, idiomatic expressions, and grammatical features. Dialects reflect and may reinforce class, ethnic, or regional differences among speakers of the same language. Sociolinguistics has become an increasingly important and popular field of study, as certain culture around the world expand their communication base and inter group and interpersonal relations take on escalating significance. The basic notion underlying sociolinguistics is quite simple: Language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behavior and human interaction. The notion is simple, but the way in which language reflects behavior can often be complex and subtle. Furthermore, the relationship between language and society affects a wide range of encounters from broadly based international relations to narrowly defined interpersonal relationship.

2.2 Bilingualism

Chaer and Agustina 1995:112 say that bilingualism is about the using of two languages of two codes. They conclude that the using of language of bilingual or multilingual man can be code-switching and code-mixing, if he speaks in bilingual or multilingual society. In bilingual or multilingual society where communication is done with two or more languages, the social phenomenon that became more complex, influences the form of the used of language. The languages spoken by the bilinguals naturally interfere with each other, producing deviation from their norm. Consequently, the bilinguals become a Universitas Sumatera Utara permanent source of linguistics interference and the class of languages in the same individual becomes linguistically intriguing. The result is an automatic modification and rearrangement in the patterns of phonology, morphology, syntax, and the lexicon of the many languages they speak. A speaker’s personality too becomes altered when he or she switches from one language to another and thus speaks two or more languages. Thus bilingualism reshapes not only one’s language but also one’s culture and personality. Consequently, a monolingual society may have difficulty in comprehending the subtleties of a bilingual society and vice versa. Beside serving some communicative functions, bilingual speakers may utilize code-mixing as a marker of ethnic or in-group identity in various intra group bilingual settings. A speaker may take every effort to code-mix by including a single utterance heshe knows from a language with which an in-group is normally associated, although heshe does not actually speak the language very much. Among sociolinguistic factors which are very influential in determining code selection in a lingual speaker’s speech repertoire are topics of conversation, role relationships of the participant and speech situation. Bernstein 1965:151 says that language is the set of rules to which all speech codes must comply, but which speech codes are generated is a function of the system of social relations. There have been some studies measuring the intelligence of monolinguals and bilinguals. Some of them have forced a correlation between intellectual inferiority and bilingualism and thus have concluded bilingualism to be harmful Universitas Sumatera Utara Eichorn and Jones 1952; Darcy 1953. According to the defenders of this view, given a choice one should avoid being a bilingual.

2.3 Code-Switching