Introduction

Talking to a young bilingual child can be both entertaining and eye-opening. Even at the tender age of two, the bilingual child is capable of expressing complex ideas, having two languages at his disposal as seen in the above exchange between Timmy and his mother (the first author). Timmy refers to his father as ing1gok3jan4 ‘English person’, his mother as zung1gok3jan4 ‘Chinese person’ and he surprises everyone, not least his mother, by referring to himself as bilingual. Apart from raising deep issues of awareness of identity, this exchange epitomises an important phenomenon typical of a bilingual child, namely that he is in contact with two languages on a daily basis.

What is it like being a bilingual child? How do children cope with learning two languages simultaneously in the first years of life? Many children, like those of cross-cultural marriages, grow up in families where more than one language is spoken on a regular basis. Their parents may each speak a different language natively, thus exposing these children to two languages from birth. The principal protagonists of this book are three siblings born in such a family where the mother is a native speaker of Cantonese (the first author) and the father of British English (the second author).