Compound and Coordinate Bilingualism

How do bilinguals organize meaning associated with their two languages? Do some bilinguals live in and express two different worlds of meaning, while others draw on the meaning system imposed by the language they learned first in order to produce their second language? Does how they became bilingual affect the way they are able to express meaning in their two languages? These questions were addressed in the early 1950s, first by Uriel Weinreich and then by Susan Ervin and Charles Osgood, who proposed a distinction between coordinate and compound bilingualism.

Weinreich was interested in describing how bilingualism develops when speakers from two different languages come into contact and speakers from one of the groups attempt to learn the language of the other group. Weinreich distinguished among three types of bilinguals, based on the relationship among signs (concrete objects), signifiers (the words used to denote them), and signified (the representation of meaning associated with the words). In this view, Type A bilinguals have an independent word and meaning system. In other words, for this type of bilingual, signifiers used in Language A have a meaning that is independent from the meaning of the same signifiers in Language B. For example, a Type A bilingual would associate a particular meaning for the signifier pencil in English and another meaning for the same signifier, lápiz, in Spanish. For bilinguals of this type, the two meanings are associated with language-specific information, because the meanings were constructed not only from information processes occurring in each language but also as a result of formations that were built up from separate experiences that shaped the meaning of the words within specific contexts.

According to Weinreich, Type B bilinguals have a single meaning system for words in the two languages. This means that any new words the learner acquires are necessarily tied to the meaning those words already have in the learner's first language. Accordingly, pencil and lápiz are separate words, but their underlying meaning is the same across the two languages. The reason for this is because Type B bilinguals acquire their second language in the same contexts as they acquired their first language.

Weinreich also proposed a Type C bilingual, who in the early stages of learning a second language translates every new word using the meaning system of the first language. As in Type B bilingualism, the meaning of any new word remains the same as in the first language (pencil as an object for writing, drawing, etc.), with no meaningful association between the signifier lápiz and what a pencil signifies in Spanish. The difference between Type B and Type C [Page 162]is essentially strategic. Type C bilinguals necessarily translate from their first language to the new language in order to learn it, while Type B bilinguals build up proficiency in their two languages using one meaning system.

Ervin and Osgood collapsed Weinreich's three-part system into two main categories, called coordinate and compound bilinguals, with Weinreich's Type A representing the former and Types B and Type C combined to form the latter. For them, the two languages of a coordinate bilingual correspond to two independent meaning (signifying) systems. A compound bilingual, in contrast, has one meaning system for the two languages. The added value of Ervin and Osgood's work was that it considered how an individual might become one type or the other, an extension of the original idea that has generated popular as well as academic interest ever since. To wit, Ervin and Osgood hypothesized that the difference between compound and coordinate bilingualism could be explained in terms of the contexts in which an individual acquired the second language. Moreover, while Weinreich talked mainly about adult bilinguals who were also literate in their first language, Ervin and Osgood were interested in child bilingualism as well as bilingualism in adulthood. For them, compound bilingualism was the result of individuals having learned the second language while constantly relying on their first language or of learners growing up with the two languages in their daily lives. For adult learners, it mattered not whether the second language was learned in school or in a foreign country. What was important was the existence of one meaning system, regardless of when or under what conditions bilingualism was acquired.

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