Editing Stuttering (section)

==== Identification ====
[[Bilingualism]] is the ability to speak two languages. Many bilingual people have been exposed to more than one language since birth and throughout childhood. Since language and culture are relatively fluid factors in a person's understanding and production of language, bilingualism may be a feature that impacts speech fluency. There are several ways during which stuttering may be noticed in bilingual children including the following.{{fact|date=February 2025}}

* The child is mixing vocabulary ([[code-mixing]]) from both languages in one sentence. This is a normal process that helps the child increase their skills in the weaker language, but may trigger a temporary increase in disfluency.<ref name="Stuttering and the Bilingual Child">{{Cite web|url=https://www.stutteringhelp.org/stuttering-and-bilingual-child|title=Stuttering and the Bilingual Child|website=Stuttering Foundation: A Nonprofit Organization Helping Those Who Stutter|date=6 May 2011 |access-date=2017-12-18|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170926020934/http://www.stutteringhelp.org/stuttering-and-bilingual-child|archive-date=2017-09-26}}</ref>
* The child is having difficulty finding the correct word to express ideas resulting in an increase in normal speech disfluency.<ref name="Stuttering and the Bilingual Child"/>
* The child is having difficulty using grammatically complex sentences in one or both languages as compared to other children of the same age. Also, the child may make grammatical mistakes. Developing proficiency in both languages may be gradual, so development may be uneven between the two languages.<ref name="Stuttering and the Bilingual Child"/>

It was once believed that being bilingual would 'confuse' a child and cause stuttering, but research has debunked this myth.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kornisch |first1=Myriam |title=Bilinguals who stutter: A cognitive perspective |journal=Journal of Fluency Disorders |date=March 2021 |volume=67 |pages=105819 |doi=10.1016/j.jfludis.2020.105819 |pmid=33296800 }}</ref>

Stuttering may present differently depending on the languages the individual uses. For example, morphological and other linguistic differences between languages may make presentation of disfluency appear to be more or less depending on the individual case.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aAbPBQAAQBAJ&q=bilingual+stuttering+wiki&pg=PA362|title=Multilingual Aspects of Fluency Disorders|last1=Howell|first1=Peter|last2=Borsel|first2=John Van|date=2011|publisher=Multilingual Matters|isbn=978-1-84769-358-7}}</ref>