[alpine]

I'm not so sure about the statement that being bilingual reduces the vocabulary. If this is true, this would discourage me from raising a kid to speak two languages... after all, wasn't George Orwell's thesis in 1984 that removing words from the language removed the ability to think? Who would want to do this to a child? Does learning Latin as a second language, or Ruby indeed, restrict your vocabulary? I doubt it.

[rcthompson]

George Orwell was talking about removing important words from the language. For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express specific concepts. When you learn a language, you learn the important words first.

We can make an analogy to programming languages. The reduced vocabulary (if any) from learning two languages at once can be likened to the fact that when you learn two programming languages you will probably not be familiar with as many modules from each language that you learn, whereas focusing on one programming language would allow you to deeply learn all the modules available. However, you would still fully learn the syntax and most of the core features of both programming languages. In contrast, the analogy to what George Orwell was talking about would be removing features from the core language to the point that it is no longer Turing-complete, and is only capable of expressing "approved" programs. Kind of like HQ9+[1], only instead of "hello world", quine, and 99 bottles, it's "The government is great", "I love the government", and "All power to the government". The plus can still increment the accumulator, but the accumulator represents how much you love the government.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B

[alpine]

You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior reasoning?

[rcthompson]

Judging from the other comment threads here, I would guess the two languages with good vocabulary in each.