Reflections of Bilingualism on the News Headlines

Bilingualism has been the subject of a lot of research in the last century. Bilingualism is having the competence to speak two languages. The reasons for bilingualism of individuals may differ. Some of them may have parents from different languages, some may be children of ethnic minority or immigrants. In daily life it is possible to encounter more bilinguals than monolinguals. Bilingualism is not a new phenomenon, and it takes place in the media and news in different ways under different titles related to it. In this study, the news about bilingualism in the newspapers of the USA, the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands is analyzed in terms of content which is named as discourse analysis. The contents are categorized under five different titles which are neurological, social-cultural, psychological, educational, national categories. It has been found that majority of news related to bilingualism belong to educational category which shows that bilingualism draws attention and is given importance in educational contexts. Another categorization in this study is implemented for speech act categories. Each headline is categorized according to the speech acts which are representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives. In this study it was found that majority of headlines belong to representative category of speech acts.