Extract

It is a truism that in our world some form of bilingualism has become part of most people's lives. Nevertheless our knowledge of the processes involved in the acquisition and the use of two or more languages by bilinguals has in many ways remained incomplete. Moreover, most research in the field has focused on adult bilingualism and has little to say about the development of bilingualism in individuals. What is badly needed are accounts of how children develop the functions and roles of different languages and how they manage to keep the language systems apart or switch from one to the other - not arbitrarily or due to a lack of competence as sometimes has been suggested but purposefully and with functions in mind.

Therefore it is of great importance that we have empirical studies such as the one by Baban Mohamed. His focus of interest is on the language behaviour of Kurdish pre-school children in Austria, who were born in Austria and have learnt Kurdish in their families and German through contact with German speaking playmates and in kindergartens. The study, which is a slightly modified version of his MA diploma thesis, shows specific interest in practices of code switching and mixing as displayed by his Kurdish subjects and in how far these can be sufficiently explained by existing models of (adult) bilingual language behavior.

What makes the study specifically interesting is the fact that the two languages involved, Kurdish and German, are...