"By definition, bilingualism is not monolingualism. Yet monolingualism is usually held up as a gold standard, and there is unfortunately even today a monolingual bias present in many studies of bilinguals" (De Houwer & Ortega 2019:10)*

In this interview Prof. Annick De Houwer shares with us the many reasons why it is about time to stop comparing multilinguals to monolinguals, and to focus on a multilingual perspective in studies about the topic.


ANNICK DE HOUWER, PhD, is Director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet; www.habilnet.org). She was trained in linguistics and held professorial positions at the universities of Antwerp and Brussels (Belgium) and at the University of Erfurt (Germany). In the US, she has been affiliated with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and was a Visiting Scholar at several top institutions there.
De Houwer's research has mainly focused on bilingual and monolingual children's language development. She has addressed both linguistic and socio-psychological aspects of language development and created the concept of Harmonious Bilingualism. She has published widely and is the author of The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study; Bilingual First Language Acquisition, An Introduction to Bilingual Development, and Bilingual Development in Childhood. She is currently the President of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). [ Ссылка ]

*De Houwer, A. & L. Ortega (2019). Introduction: Learning, using and unlearning more than one language. In Annick De Houwer & Lourdes Ortega (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1-12.



These are the studies mentioned during the interview and that we recommend about the topic:
De Houwer, A. (2017). Minority language parenting in Europe and children's well-being. In N. Cabrera & B. Leyendecker (Eds.), Handbook on Positive Development of Minority Children and Youth, Berlin, Germany: Springer, 231-246.

De Houwer, A. (2020). Harmonious bilingualism: Well-being for families in bilingual settings. In A. Schalley & S. Eisenchlas (Eds.), Handbook of home language maintenance and development: Social and affective factors. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 63–83.

De Houwer, A. (2022). The danger of bilingual–monolingual comparisons in applied psycholinguistic research. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-15. doi:10.1017/S014271642200042X

Bilingual Bilingual Comparison:
De Houwer, A. (2023). Polish-German preschoolers develop and use heritage Polish differently depending on whether they heard German from birth or not. Frontiers in Psychology 14:1080122.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1080122

Other studies mentioned during the interview:
Genesee, F. (2022). The monolingual bias. A critical analysis. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education. [ Ссылка ]

Zubrzycki, Kamil (2019). Am I perfect enough to be a true bilingual? Monolingual bias in the lay perception and self-perception of bi- and multilinguals. IRAL – International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 57 (4): 447-495. DOI: 10.1515/iral-2016-0095

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