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Introduction
The early bilingual vocabulary development in minority-majority language contexts
Children acquire a language through exposure to that language. Likewise, bilingual children acquire their two languages through exposure to these two languages. In language contexts with a majority language existing alongside a minority language, the majority language is the societal dominant or omnipresent language and the minority language has a more modest place in society. From the perspective of children this means that although most interactional language input may be in the minority language, e.g., from parents and other family members or friends, there is almost always exposure to the majority language due to its stronger presence in society. On the other hand, children growing up with the majority language at home will generally have little exposure to the minority language due to its modest place in society. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of early input in a majority language versus a (regional) minority language on the development of a bilingual vocabulary, in this case Dutch and Frisian in Friesland. Friesland is a bilingual province in the north of the Netherlands, where these two languages co-exist at a societal level. Frisian is the minority language and it exists alongside the majority (national) language, Dutch. This study focuses on the effects of home language and exposure from caregivers other than the parents on the development of Frisian and Dutch vocabulary by young bilinguals.
Studies from language contexts with a minority and a majority language show that especially in the development of the minority language, the home languages of children play an important role. Scheele, Leseman and Mayo (2010) investigated the role of input factors on receptive vocabulary of preschoolers from monolingual Dutch, Turkish and Moroccan families in the Netherlands. They found that greater usage of the immigrant language (Turkish or Tarafit-Berber) at home generally led to higher results in receptive vocabulary in that home language, and lower results in Dutch receptive vocabulary. Hammer, Davison, Lawrence and Miccio (2009) demonstrated that the usage of Spanish at home affected the development of Spanish receptive vocabulary development of young bilinguals in the United States. Furthermore, the usage of Spanish at home did not...