Bilinguality vs. Monolinguality among Kalhuri Kurdish Speakers: Gender, Social Class and English Language Achievement

Today in multilingual contexts, many parents prefer to rear their children in the dominant language rather than in their mother tongue. This phenomenon is widespread among native speakers of Kalhuri dialect of the Kurdish language in the multilingual context of Iran, too. Being such a widespread issue, bilinguality has attracted increasing research interest and, accordingly, some studies have evidenced its effects on learning an additional language while some others have provided counterevidence in this regard. The present study chiefly intended to see if there was any difference between Kalhuri Kurdish learners reared monolingually (using Persian) and the ones reared bilingually (using both Kalhuri and Persian) in terms of their achievement in English. In addition, it aimed at exploring the relationship between gender and socioeconomic status and bilinguality vs. monolinguality. To achieve these purposes, data were gathered from 200 bilingual and 200 monolingual Kurd students, living in Kermanshah, whose parents native language was the Kalhuri dialect of Kurdish. Analyses of the data indicated that although gender had no significant relationship with bilinguality vs. monolinguality, most students from low socioeconomic class were reared bilingually. Moreover, the students reared bilingually outperformed their monolingual counterparts in terms of achievement in English.