EXAMPLES OF BEING BILINGUAL, BICULTURAL AND BOTH

A bilingual and bicultural person is someone who has grown up in a place where two different languages are spoken, they may have grown up speaking Spanish at home and learned English in school, which allows them to interact fluently in both cultures.

A bilingual may use their language in the following ways in everyday life, with their parents, siblings, at work, when reading or writing, and when talking to friends

Taking into account the above figure represented by the Complementarity pattern (Grosejan, 1997).

"Bilinguals tend to acquire and use their languages for different purposes, in different areas of life, and with different people. Different aspects of life often require different languages" (Grosjean, 1997, p. 13).

Thus, in relation to the above, very few areas of daily life are covered by two or more languages, and when such a language is used in a limited way in the environment, it is likely to be used less frequently and less fluently; on the contrary, the more a language is used in an area, the greater the fluency and proficiency.

On the other hand, a bicultural person may be the child of two people from different cultures, for example, a Japanese father and a Colombian mother, or those immigrants who have spent a long time in another country.

Biculturals are classified by:

1. They take part, to varying degrees, in the life of two or more cultures. 

2. They adapt, in part at least, their attitudes, behaviors, values, languages, etc. to these cultures. 

3. They combine and blend aspects of the cultures involved. Some of these come from one or the other culture(s) whereas others are blends of the cultures. (Grosjean, 2008; see also Nguyen and Benet-Martinez, 2007)

Bilingualism and biculturalism are not always related, because there are bilinguals who use two or more languages and have lived in only one culture, for example, the Swiss Germans who speak German and Swiss but belong to the Swiss culture and people who are bilingual and bicultural like immigrants who acquired the second language and adapted to the new culture. 

Generally, bicultural behavior occurs when they meet other biculturals, they share the same cultures and interact by choosing a cultural base, letting out the other culture when necessary. However, certain attitudes, behaviors, and feelings will not be able to adapt totally, that said, bicultural bilinguals manage to adapt in a good way in their behavior, and cultural context and can feel different speaking in a second language, in this order of ideas, this feeling is generated by the context. It should also be noted that bicultural bilinguals are very different from monocultural bilinguals.