Linguistic accommodation in a bilingual family: One perspective on the language acquisition of a bilingual child being raised in a monolingual community

Abstract

A report is given on one longitudinal aspect of the language acquisition of Alun, a Welsh/English bilingual child being raised in England. The father is L1 Welsh, but the mother has learned Welsh in order to speak it to her son, and the standard of her spoken Welsh is still no more than that of a good learner. In the course of the study it was noticed that the father was accommodating both the mother's and the child's linguistic errors. This report attempts to identify the areas in which accommodation is taking place and examines the possible reasons for it. The data were collected by the mother as part of a longitudinal study of her son from l‐61/2 years.