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A bilingual person is, in its broadest definition, anyone with communicative skills in two languages, be it active or passive. In a narrow definition, the term bilingual is often reserved for those speakers with native or native-like proficiency in two languages. Similarly, the terms trilingual and multilingual are used to describe comparable situation in which three resp. more languages are involved.
Bilingual speakers, as is common in human societies, have acquired at least one language during childhood, the so-called L1. L1-type languages are acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. A rather broadly held, yet nearly as broadly criticised view, is taken by the American linguist Noam Chomsky, whose professional life has so far mainly been dedicated to the description of the human language module, the mechanism that enables us to correctly recreate the rules that speakers around us apply to the language they speak. This language module, according to Chomsky, wears out over time, and is not normally available by puberty, which explains the relatively poor results adolescents and adults have in language learning, as compared to children.
Bilingual speakers have got an extra language at their disposal. In the narrow definition of bilingualism, this is a second L1, in the broader definition, it can also be an L2 (a second language), a language that has been learnt at a later age. If language learning is a cognitive process, rather than a language module, as the school led by Stephen Krashen suggests, there would only be relative, no categorial differences between the two types of language learning.
Even if someone is a highly proficient bilingual at the performance or output level, his so-called bilingual competence may not be so balanced. Linguists distinguish various types of bilingual competence, which can roughly be put into three categories:
Coordinate and compound bilinguals are reported to have a higher cognitive proficiency, and are found to be better L2-learners at a later age, than monolinguals. The early discovery that concepts of the world can be labeled in more than one fashion puts those bilinguals in the lead. There is, however, also a phenomenon known as distractive bilingualism. When acquisition of the first language is interrupted and insufficient, or unstructured language input follows from the second language, as often happens with immigrant children, the speaker can end up with two languages both mastered below the monolingual standards.
In bilingual societies, not all speakers need to be bilinguals. When all speakers are bilinguals, linguists classify the community according to the functional distribution of the languages involved: