co-ordinate bilingualism

A term used by some linguists in the early classification of bilingualism. Co-ordinate bilinguals are those who learn their languages in different environments, associate them with different cultures, and develop different mental representations. They thus attribute partly or wholly different MEANINGS to corresponding LEXICAL units in the two LANGUAGES (e.g. dog in English would mean something different from chien in French). The contrast was with COMPOUND bilingualism, where the meanings are seen as identical; but the existence of much bilingual behavior that falls between these two categories has made the distinction unfashionable.