www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF BILINGUALISM IN ANIMAL’S PEOPLE AND GIFTED VISHNU KUMAR SHARMA & MAHESH KUMAR SHARMA Jaipur, Rajasthan, India ABSTRACT The present article focuses on the concepts needed to understand what it means for two languages to come into contact. It deals with some of the principles which are required to take an account of how people mix language in creative writings. It encompasses the complex phenomenon of the creative language and code mixing in detail. The focus is on when and why the speaker or writer feels the need to mix lexical items and linguistic features of two different codes in a sentence, how a speaker handles these languages simultaneously and what crucial features are needed in code-mixing. The study of code-mixing proves extremely beneficial, especially when the reader and writer are from different social background because their cultural is very different from the rest of the society. In cross-cultural communication people have to switch to other code on demand of the situation ie when the equivalent word in target language does not reflect exactly the same meaning that is conveyed in the mother tongue or for conveying a specific cultural meaning. KEYWORDS: Multicultural Communication, Grammaticalness, Interpretability, Constraint, Intrasentential, Inter-Sentential, Lexical Borrowing INTRODUCTION BILINGUALISM: CONCEPTS AND DEFINITION Language contact inevitably leads to bilingualism. The terms bilingual and bilingualism can be applied to situations where two or more languages are involved. Bilingualism begins at the point where the speaker of one language can produce meaningful utterances in the other language. Bilingualism as a term has open-ended semantics 1 comments Baetens Beardsmore. For the average speaker, bilingualism can be loosely defined as the use of two languages or the native-like control of two languages. At the heart of the description of bilingualism is the issue of degree of bilingualism, it refers to the levels of linguistic proficiency which a bilingual must achieve in both languages to be considered a bilingual. Bloomfield defined bilingualism as native-like control of two languages 2 , while, in contrast, Mackey defined bilingualism as the alternate use of two or more languages by the same individual 3 . In a similar vein Mackey, Weinreich defined bilingualism as the practice of alternately using two language 4 while Haugen proposed the point where a speaker can first produce complete meaningful utterances in the other language 5 to be a starting point for defining bilingualism. As can be seen, these definitions range from Bloomfield’s rigorous expectations of totally balanced bilingualism to Mackey’s and Haugen’s looser requirements of mere ability or the practice of using two languages. Baetens Beardsmore described these two extremes as minimalist (Mackey, Weinreich) and maximalist (Bloomfield) in approach. Haugen’s view could also be considered minimalist, Though the discussion of how bilingualism should be defined has often centred on the issue of language competence, this focus overlooks other socio-cultural and cognitive factors which are just as relevant when discussing the International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028 Vol. 5, Issue 5, Oct 2015, 139-156 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.