To protect themselves from the plague of informers, people learned -- without anyone knowing how or where, or when, without schools, without courses, without records or dictionaires -- another language, mastered it, and became so fluent in it that we simple and uneducated folk suddenly became a bilingual nation.
From The Emperor. Downfall of an Autocrat
by Ryszard Kapuściński. New York: Vintage House. (translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand)
The words above, taken from a book by the late Polish writer, Kapuściński, confim the fact that much multilingual acquisition occurs without the intervention of formal schooling. Yet, because bilingualism has been most often studied from a European perspective, formal schooling, and in particular, bilingual education, dominates the literature on bilingual and multilingual acquisition. This chapter reviews the scant literature that exists on how individuals and communities become multilingual without formal schooling. In particular, it attempts to answer the question: How do individuals and communities educate themselves to become multilingual without the help of formal schooling?
Leaving aside the formal school domain, the review will focus on other domains where multilingual acquisition occurs, such as:
It will also be the purpose of the review to identify other domains that may be important in multilingual acquisition and that are not identified in this proposal.
In all domains, the tools used in the process of multilingual acquisition will be identified. Motivations for engaging in the individual or group´s multilingual education will also be discussed.
Because of the angle through which multilingual acquisition will be studied in this chapter, the review will have to draw much from the literature on multilingualism in Africa, Asia, and Indigenous communities, where much multilingual acquisition occurs in families and informal settings. But the focus of the review will not be a particular group or site, but rather it will explore what we know and don´t know about informal multilingual acquisition. The review will set the stage for empirical study at a later time.
Paper(January 2008 final draft)