Mixed Native Languages

The monolithic view of language, in which languages are discrete entities, clashes with naturally occurring speech, especially in bilingual communities. The clash is a result of the monolingual bias in linguistic description, but existing descriptive machinery is shown to be well-suited to deal with bilingual language use. Immigrant communities tend to develop mixed vernaculars, which, under certain circumstances, may become the native language of the community in question. When that happens, the community may still have enough ties to the monolingual society surrounding them for children growing up in it to achieve fluency in the language of that society, but there are circumstances under which that is not the case.