4. Advantages and disadvantages of trilingualism

Trilingualism: Advantages and disadvantages

There are a lot of advantages of knowing more than one language; it changes the brain in a significant way. Hereby, some of them will be mentioned.

The main one is having access to three cultures. So, people sometimes view others as part of their speech community according to typical social or political characteristics if they are reacted to share some experience with them. (Susan M. Gass, 1989, p. 21)

In addition, basic motor elements behind this broader perspective trilingual language include increased sensitivity to socio-cultural diversity, and therefore behavior outside of traditional imposed by society and classrooms. Also they cover the wide variety of issues and problems based on the linguistic level of society that have arisen from increased migration. (Susan M. Gass, 1989, p. 29)

Another advantage is that the acquisition of several languages being considered by a more positive way it used to be the case because of the importance of these multilingual competences of individuals. So, multilingual people tend to be more careful readers; and with this ability, they gain a broad understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds. Bilinguals are less distracted by the automated tasks like that. (Susan M. Gass, 1989, p. 33)

The last one is that multilingual people find it easier to pick up other languages, because of their spontaneous understanding of language. (Sorace, p. 2)

But, there are some disadvantages too, for example, the change in the perspective towards the value contained in multilingualism at the individual and societal level has been slow. (Larissa Aronin, 2009, p. 30) Also, there is now a considerable collection of research findings according to the influence of the mother tongue has on the knowledge of other languages that somebody is trying to learn. (Susan M. Gass, 1989, p. 165)

Trilingual people may not have the same proficiency in or control over all those familiar languages they know, the vocabulary is usually shorter or the way to organize vocabulary in a discourse may change. (Swan, 2008) And they sometimes confuse the languages structures, and they change the word order. Word order is so important; it “constitutes one area of language organization in which a number of separate spheres of linguistic inquiry quite naturally converge.” (Susan M. Gass, et al., 1989, p. 163)

Besides - in early multilingualism - different aspects in use of tongue input can affect the development of languages in children. (Barnes, 2006, pág. 10)

In conclusion, multilingualism is a process in which learners have to be patient and responsible to acquire each of the languages because trilingualism no only involves linguistic skills in three languages, but the ability to understand and function in trilingual contexts too. (Henn-Reinike, 2012, p. 1)