36.1521, Reviews: On Bilinguals and Bilingualism: Fendel (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1521. Wed May 14 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1521, Reviews: On Bilinguals and Bilingualism: Fendel (2025)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Joel Jenkins <joel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 13-May-2025
From: Victoria Beatrix Fendel [vbmf2 at cantab.ac.uk]
Subject: Applied Linguistics; On Bilinguals and Bilingualism: Fendel (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-149

Title: On Bilinguals and Bilingualism
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL: https://cambridge.org/9781009210416

Author(s): François Grosjean

Reviewer: Victoria Beatrix Fendel

SUMMARY
Grosjean’s On Bilinguals and bilingualism consists of eleven chapters,
an appendix containing his position paper on the right of the deaf
child to grow up bilingually, a subject and researcher index, and a
list of references. The book sets itself the goal to tie together
forty years of research by the author in the area of bilingualism with
a specific focus on a psycholinguistic approach to the matter, to set
his work against the research community’s and often the general
public’s reactions, and to offer follow-up comments on issues that the
author had thought about further. The book fully achieves this goal
and in fact exceeds it.
The introduction explains the scope of the book in a short and concise
way. The chapter already reflects the personal and self-critical
approach taken, with Grosjean signposting to his follow-up comments on
his own work and his dialogue with reactions from colleagues.
Grosjean’s goal is to “avoid too much terminology” (p. 2), a goal that
was certainly achieved. The book reads well and smoothly and the
reader is at no point slowed down by terminology or manner of writing.
Chapter 1 charts Grosjean’s own journey to bilingualism (“so I started
my life as a monolingual”, p. 4) from his childhood in France and and
English-medium school in Switzerland through his Master’s thesis in
Paris on interferences, i.e. “deviations from the language being
written or spoken stemming from the influence of the other language”
(p. 7), especially grammatical ones (p. 9) to becoming an experimental
psycholinguist in the early days of bilingualism research. Grosjean
provides an overview of his 1982 book Life with Two languages, which
crucially defines bilinguals as “people who use two or more languages
[(or dialects) (p. 31)] in their everyday life” (p. 10, something that
was only gradually adopted, see p. 17) and bilingualism as “neither a
problem nor an asset but quite simply a fact of life” (p. 10) [my
emphasis in quotes]. He also discusses the “over-importance given to
fluency (now usually referred to as proficiency)” (p. 17) and
emphasises that languages can go dormant (p. 17), and that
interferences can result amongst other things from the avoidance of
certain elements (p. 19). Noticeably, he notes that the passage of
bilingualism “often leaves a permanent trace in the language that has
survived” (p. 21).
Chapter 2 presents Grosjean’s holistic view of bilingualism which is
“neither a problem nor an asset but quite simply a fact of life” (p.
23). Bilinguals have traditionally been assessed with the ideal
monolingual speaker-hearer as the bar, and this has been detrimental
to the individuals involved and the field as a whole. His key notion
is that of speech modes: he distinguishes between the monolingual mode
when the language that is not used in active production is
deactivated, the bilingual mode when both languages are activated, and
an intermediate mode (p. 28). The bilingual will shift quite easily
towards the bilingual end of the mode continuum when, for example,
they know that the interviewer is bilingual or they notice the setting
is favourable towards bilingualism. It is thus a variable to control
for in experimental studies (p. 31, p. 48). He further introduces the
idea of language histories of bilinguals, i.e the dominant language
can shift several times over the course of a bilingual’s life (pp.
32–34) such that “the bilingual’s first language is not automatically
the stronger language at a particular point in time” (p. 34). Grosjean
fundamentally believes that all language users are fully competent
communicators independently of the number of languages they use (p.
34). Grosjean’s view on the bilingual not just being two monolinguals
has found recognition in policy (p. 39); yet he acknowledges that “it
will take many more years for the majority of the general public, as
well as specialized bodies in research and education, to envisage
bilinguals as specific speaker-hearers in their own right and to do
away with a monolingual bias” (p. 39).
Chapter 3 is dedicated to the bilingual’s language modes, i.e. the
bilingual, the intermediate, and the monolingual modes that the
bilingual shifts between dependent on environmental cues (p. 44), but
usually subconsciously (p. 45). Grosjean considers dynamic
interferences “ephemeral or accidental intrusions of the other
language” (p. 41). Language mode comprises two components, the base
language, i.e. the language that is communicated in primarily, and the
level of activation of the two languages (p. 43). Processing seems
selective in bilingual mode but non-selective in monolingual mode, as
shown by multiple experimental studies that Grosjean reports on and
that have taken the speech mode into account as a variable to control
for. In bilingual mode, switching seems to come at no perception cost
(p. 53). Language mode is “a complex behavioural phenomenon and a
cognitive phenomenon” (p. 55).
Chapter 4 explains the complementarity principle, i.e. languages are
mapped onto domains in which the bilingual uses them and “if a
language is never used for a particular purpose, it will not develop”
in this domain (p. 62). Bilinguals can be dominant in one or the other
language for specific domains of life (p. 63). Noticeably, for
instance counting and mathematical computations “usually take place in
the language in which they were learned” (p. 69) and memories may be
retrieved more readily in the language in which they were lived (p.
70). The principle has found its way into public discourse at the
grassroots (p. 72). The complementarity principle ties in with  a
bilingual’s language histories, thus acknowledging that the
complementary distribution can change over the course of his lifetime,
as well as with the notion that bilinguals are not two monolinguals –
in fact they can be as proficient as a monolingual in those domains in
which the relevant language is their dominant language.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to spoken language processing and considers
aspects such as the critical period, such that “some mechanisms and
strategies are not acquired in that language because the first
language does not have them and/or the second language has been
acquired later” (p. 78). Examples that are discussed are the
sensitivity to grammatical gender marking, yet noticeably this is
present in highly proficient L2 learners (p. 81), the base language
effect, i.e. to what extent “base-language units (phonemes, syllables,
words) are favored over guest-language units … since the base language
is the language being processed primarily and is the most active” (p.
81), an effect which exists in everyday life (p. 85), and guest word
recognition, i.e. code-switches or borrowings in bilingual speech,
something which seems influenced by language phonetics, phonotactics,
and interlanguage homophonic status (p. 88). Grosjean finishes by
briefly pointing to his computational model of bilingual lexical
access (BIMOLA) (p. 91). This is possibly the most technical chapter
as it requires some understanding of experimental setup and it does
require those without this background to read sentences twice, yet it
is credit to the author in that it is fully comprehensible in the
latter case.
Chapter 6 charts the distinction between ephemeral interferences and
more permanent transfer phenomena (p. 93). Grosjean stresses that
influence can be from the first language onto the second language but
also from the second language onto the first language e.g. in
scenarios of “long-term immigration where, over the years, the first
language starts to be used less often and its domains of use are
restricted” (p. 97). In the experimental setup he reports on,
attention is paid to the recognition of variants of the first language
(here Neuchatel variants of Spanish); the experiment tests whether
language users aware that what is presented to them is different from
the “pure” first language (pp. 98–99). The bilingual group of test
subjects considered the variants highly present and highly acceptable
(p. 98), whereas the monolingual control group considered the variants
unacceptable (p. 99).
Chapter 7 discusses the issue of biculturalism and noticeably begins
by clarifying that “individuals can be bilingual and bicultural, but
also bilingual and monocultural, monolingual and bicultural, and
monolingual and monocultural” (p. 103) thus clearly refuting the idea
that there is a one-to-one mapping between bilingual and bicultural.
Like bilinguals, biculturals take part in two cultures, adapt their
attitudes, behaviours, values, and languages to these cultures, and
combine aspects of the two cultures; unlike bilinguals, biculturals
cannot always deactivate all the traits of their other culture in a
monocultural setting (p. 105). Grosjean sets nationality clearly apart
from culture; they are not the same (p. 104). Noticeably, many
biculturals identify with only one of their cultures or sometimes with
none (p. 106) rather than with both. When biculturals make a decision
on cultural identity, “the perception of the members of the two
cultures” as well as “their personal history, their identity needs,
their knowledge of the languages and cultures involved, their
nationality/-ties” can play a role (p. 111). Some will reject both
cultures, which may result in a feeling of marginality and ambivalence
(p. 112).  While language is one factor in bicultural bilinguals’
switching between their cultural bases, it is not the only one; rather
there is usually a change in context that prompts the shift (p. 117).
It is not the case that a bicultural bilingual has two separate
personalities that are activated purely by language choice. Language
acts at best as a prime (p. 118).
Chapter 8 advocates for bilingualism between sign language and the
spoken language of the surrounding community. Like other bilinguals,
the deaf bilingual may be dominant in one of their languages, may not
think that they are bilingual, may use their two languages in
complementary distribution, and may move between language modes;
unlike other bilinguals, deaf bilinguals have long received little
recognition of their bilingualism, remain bilingual throughout their
lives, may not acquire certain majority language skills, and will most
often be in bilingual mode. Deaf people take part, adapt to, and blend
aspects of the two cultures they are part of, the deaf and the spoken
one; yet the process of choosing one or the other cultural identity or
rejecting both is complicated, as it is for other biculturals.
Building on his advocacy paper, Grosjean emphasises that the deaf
child has the right to grow up bilingually in order to ensure that
linguistic, cognitive, social, and personal development are not
impeded, rather than caregivers’  betting  on the child’s future by
relying solely on technological advances.
Chapter 9 offers numerical insights into bilingualism in the United
States, Canada, Switzerland, and France and suggests that overall
about half of the world’s population are bilingual. For the US, the
data come from the 1976 Survey on Income and Education, the 1980 and
1990 censuses, and the American Community Survey. Over this period of
time, bilingualism increased from about 10% to about 20% partially
driven most likely by immersion programmes and the retention of
minority languages. For Canada, the data come from censuses which
dedicate several questions to bilingualism. For 2016, it is suggested
that 26% of people were bilingual. For Switzerland, the data come from
Swiss Statistics and show that about 40% of the country were bilingual
in 2012, crucially considering Swiss German-German pairings bilingual.
For France, the data come from a 1999 study conducted by the French
Institute for Demographic Studies and show that about 20% of the
population were bilingual then. Grosjean freely admits that his
estimate of about 50% of the world population as bilingual is an
estimate and that exact values are difficult to obtain but shows in a
very critical manner how many routes he went down and how many other
values are ghosting about (pp. 145–147).
Chapter 10 dives into special bilinguals, especially bilingual writers
of literature, translators and interpreters, second-language teachers,
and other special bilinguals (sleeper agents, foreign correspondents,
pilots and air traffic controllers). With regard to interpreters and
translators, Grosjean highlights their need not only to understand the
source language but also to have the necessary transfer skills; in the
case of interpreters, in fact, a rather unusual constellation of
language activation is at work, i.e. they have to have both their
languages fully active but one language is only for perception and one
only for production, even if these are drawn upon simultaneously.
Second-language teachers are special bilinguals in that their language
use is often limited to the classroom, they have insight into the
linguistics of the language, and they need to have both their
languages active at all times. They usually have strong (and somewhat
antiquated) opinions on what it means to be bilingual and would not
consider themselves bilingual. Grosjean’s other special bilinguals
include 1) foreign correspondents, who have to maintain their two
cultures independently in order to be able to recognise what is of
interest to their audience, 2) pilots and air traffic controllers, who
communicate in English and whose communication has to be perfect as
the safety and security of hundreds of people is at stake which is why
a fixed phraseology and a system of double-checking is in place, and
3) sleeper agents who have to completely hide their bilingualism and
biculturalism even in moments of stress or high emotion and fully
immerse in the host language and culture for their safety while
staying loyal to the culture of their employer’s country.
Chapter 11 opens with a paragraph on the straightforward path of
academic careers (p. 158), which seems a fact of the past although all
the ingredients are still there. The chapter however gains momentum
when Grosjean highlights the importance of making research that has a
direct impact on individuals’ lives visible and comprehensible to all.
The chapter reflects on his work in publications and interviews,
including his books aimed at a general public (2010a, 2015b), in order
to debunk commonly held beliefs on bilingualism such as “bilinguals
are rare and have equal and perfect knowledge of their languages; real
bilinguals have acquired their two or more languages in childhood and
have no accent in either of them; bilinguals are born translators;
switching between languages is a sign of laziness in bilinguals; all
bilinguals are also bicultural; bilinguals have double or split
personalities; bilingualism will delay language acquisition in
children and have negative effects on their development; if you want
your child to grow up bilingual, use the one person-one language
approach; children being raised bilingual will always mix their
languages” (pp. 159–160, reproduced in full here to show the length of
even the selective list). Gronsjean ran the Life as a Bilingual blog
on Psychology Today from 2010 to 2023 and eventually turned the blog
posts into a more durable and organised format, his 2021 book written
during the Covid pandemic. The blog is a prime example of how to
condense and audience-orient cutting-edge research. Grosjean also
engaged in advocacy in his position paper The Right of the Deaf Child
to Grow Up Bilingual (also provided in the Appendix), translated into
French subsequently. This paper has resonated with policy makers
around the world and has been mentioned in their mission statements
(pp. 167–168).
EVALUATION
Grosjean’s book is outstandingly timely, refreshingly personal, and
fundamentally self-critical. He has worked on bilingualism for forty
years and heralded a view of the bilingual speaker-hearer as normal
rather than the odd one out. This view has not trickled down to the
general public. Rather, fuelled by societal discourse, one more often
than not is confronted with questions like “do I hear the hint of an
accent? where is that from?”, even if being a balanced bilingual in
Grosjean’s terms. The question inherently qualifies the bilingual as
the other, something Grosjean has shown extensively in his work is not
the case (ca. 50% of the world are bilingual, even more when dialects
are taken into account). At best the bilingual is an exotic outlier,
at worst bilingualism is conceptualised as a disadvantage, as
someone’s linguistic capabilities being lower than that of a
monolingual. The usual follow-up is a rather insulting comment on
someone’s language level, e.g. English  (“but of course your English
is fantastic”). While this is the daily reality, resulting in
exclusion, division, and communicative barriers, Grosjean has promoted
a model that considers bilingualism normal, that carefully
distinguishes between domains of language usage and proficiency, and
that puts a focus on language use. He pointedly mentions in several
chapters how little has trickled down into public discourse. Grosjean
is refreshingly personal, giving the reader a clear idea of the
author’s personal experience, knowledge, and access to resources. Not
only does this make his work relatable, but, much more importantly, it
contributes to a discourse that acknowledges that in the end every
researcher’s unique perspective will have an impact on what they look
at, how, and why; and this perspective should be spelled out in order
to make results fully replicable. Grosjean is self-critical, looking
back at his work and adding comments where he has put further thought
into a concept, changed his view, or made it more nuanced. This
self-reflexivity makes the book outstanding; it is something we would
like to have from every researcher towards the end of their career,
something that makes it possible to put all the building blocks
together without conjecturing what he might have thought but instead
knowing what he does think now.
Somewhat surprisingly, despite the overall coherence of the book, the
section in Chapter 10 on bilingual writers of literature opens with
“some people do write in another language, or several others, but they
may not feel totally at ease doing so” (p. 150). Why does the
complementarity principle not apply here? Why would a bilingual
necessarily prefer their first language?
Beyond this, I can only echo what many have said about Grosjean’s
previous books, I saw much of myself in this book (e.g. p. 161). In
fact, I first encountered Grosjean’s work in 2015, his 2001 book
chapter “The bilingual’s language modes” to be precise. Both his
language modes and the notion of dynamic interference found their way
into my first monograph on language contact and bilingualism in
Graeco-Roman Egypt (Fendel 2022, pp. 60–61). On Bilinguals and
bilingualism if read widely enough has the potential to make an
immense positive contribution to a society in which sociolinguistic
indexicals (Eckert 2008) are treated such that we see accent bias
impact hiring procedures (Levon et al. 2021), possibly based on
indicators not even markers (Meyerhoff 2019, p. 23), in which identity
is often imposed based on aspects of someone’s language use instead of
an acceptance of post-structuralist conceptualisations of identity
such as distributed identity (Pennycock and Otsuji 2022), and in which
minority varieties, whether they are labelled dialects or languages
currently (Van Rooy 2020), do not receive the resources, support, and
recognition needed to keep them alive (Clément-Wilz 2024). Yet, given
Grosjean’s range, there is potential for his ideas to reach the
broadest possible audience, e.g. in the form of his book aimed at the
general public (2010), his autobiography (2019), and his blog posts in
book form (2021). I am grateful this book exists and I hope it will
leave its mark in our society.
REFERENCES
Clément-Wilz, Laure. 2024. Les « droits fondamentaux linguistiques »
existent-ils ?: Une réflexion interdisciplinaire. Language Problems
and Language Planning 48(2). 123–145.
https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00121.cle.
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453–476.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00374.x.
Fendel, Victoria. 2022. Coptic interference in the syntax of Greek
letters from Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grosjean, Francois. 2001. The bilingual’s language modes. In Janet
Nicol (ed.), One mind, two languages: bilingual language processing,
1–22. Malden, Mass. ; Oxford: Blackwell.
Grosjean, François. 2010. Bilingual: life and reality. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Grosjean, François. 2015. Parler plusieurs langues: le monde des
bilingues. Paris: Albin Michel.
Grosjean, François. 2019. A journey in languages and cultures: the
life of a bicultural bilingual. First edition. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Grosjean, François. 2021. Life as a bilingual: knowing and using two
or more languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levon, Erez, Devyani Sharma, Dominic Watt, Amanda Cardoso & Yang Ye.
2021. Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in
England. Journal of English Linguistics 49(4). 355–388.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00754242211046316.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2019. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Pennycook, Alastair & Emi Otsuji. 2022. Metrolingual Practices and
Distributed Identities: People, Places, Things and Languages. In Linda
Fisher & Wendy Ayres-Bennett (eds.), Multilingualism and Identity:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 69–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Van Rooy, Raf (ed.). 2020. Language or Dialect? The History of a
Conceptual Pair. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Victoria B. Fendel (D.Phil. Oxford, 2018) is a research associate at
the University of Oxford, one of the editors of the Classics section
of the Literary Encyclopedia, and language leader for Ancient Greek in
the PARSEME/UniDive COST initiative. Her research focusses on language
contact (Oxford University Press, 2022) and multi-word expressions (De
Gruyter Brill, 2025) in literary, epigraphic, and papyrological
sources.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1521
----------------------------------------------------------