Editing Multilingualism (section)

===Receptive bilingualism===
{{Main|Passive speaker (language)}}
Receptive bilinguals are those who can understand a second language but who cannot speak it or whose abilities to speak it are inhibited by psychological barriers. Receptive bilingualism is frequently encountered among adult immigrants to the [[United States|U.S.]] who do not speak English as a native language but who have children who do speak English natively, usually in part because those children's education has been conducted in English; while the immigrant parents can understand both their native language and English, they speak only their native language to their children. If their children are likewise receptively bilingual but productively English-monolingual, throughout the conversation the parents will speak their native language and the children will speak English. If their children are productively bilingual, however, those children may answer in their parents' native language, in English, or in a combination of both languages, varying their choice of language depending on factors such as the communication's content, context or emotional intensity and the presence or absence of third-party speakers of one language or the other. The third alternative represents the phenomenon of "[[code-switching]]" in which the productively bilingual party to a communication switches languages in the course of that communication. Receptively bilingual persons, especially children, may rapidly achieve oral fluency by spending extended time in situations where they are required to speak the language that they theretofore understood only passively. Until both generations achieve oral fluency, not all definitions of bilingualism accurately characterize the family as a whole, but the linguistic differences between the family's generations often constitute little or no impairment to the family's functionality.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Nakamura|first=Janice|date=2019-09-01|title=Receptive bilingual children's use of language in interaction|url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349176664 |volume=18 |publisher=The Japanese Society for Language Sciences |journal=Studies in Language Sciences|pages=46–66|language=en|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122103522/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349176664_Receptive_bilingual_children's_use_of_language_in_interaction|archive-date=January 22, 2022|url-status=live}}</ref> Receptive bilingualism in one language as exhibited by a speaker of another language, or even as exhibited by most speakers of that language, is not the same as [[mutual intelligibility]] of languages; the latter is a property of a pair of ''languages'', namely a consequence of objectively high lexical and grammatical similarities between the languages themselves (e.g., Norwegian and Swedish), whereas the former is a property of one or more ''persons'' and is determined by subjective or intersubjective factors such as the respective languages' prevalence in the life history (including family upbringing, educational setting, and ambient culture) of the person or persons.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=spa |title=Ethnologue report for language code: spa |publisher=Ethnologue.com |access-date=2010-07-10 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100418134038/http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=spa |archive-date=18 April 2010 }}</ref>