The Linguistic Competence of a Trilingual at Age Five

Abstract

Linguistic competence is an essential component of the overall competence in a language. It is indicated by the speaker's knowledge of vocabulary and knowledge of the morphological, syntactic, semantic, phonetic, and orthographic rules. This study aimed to determine the trilingual competence of a Kenyan child, at age five, raised in an urban multilingual setting. This was done by calculating the Mean Length of Sentences (MLU) in three languages the children spoke: English, Kiswahili, and Mother Tongue. The study employed Canale and Swain's communicative competence model as the theoretical framework. Purposive and Snowball sampling methods were used to get a sample of six children (three boys and three girls) for this Study. The results indicate that children have linguistic competence in the three languages by age five. The language with the highest MLU was Kiswahili, followed by Mother Tongue and English, respectively. The trilingual acquisition is enabled by the multilingual factor, while the variation in competence is explained by Language in Education Policy (LiEP) and language use at home.