The Bilinguals' Creativity

Abstract

The term bilinguals' creativity is used here to refer to those creative linguistic processes which are the result of competence in two or more languages. The term is not interpreted in the sense of acquisitional inadequacies of the bilinguals in a particular language, as has generally been done in describing the linguistic behavior of the bilinguals' use of “non-native” languages. The concept creativity applies both to an individual bilingual and to a bilingual speech community (or a speech fellowship). The bilinguals' creativity entails two things: first, the designing of a text which uses linguistic resources from two or more—related or unrelated—languages; second, the use of verbal strategies in which subtle linguistic adjustments are made for psychological, sociological, and attitudinal reasons. Examples of such creativity may be drawn from non-native literatures written in English or French, or the code-mixed varieties of languages (see section 2 below).