Bilingual development of Malay and English : the case of plural marking

![CDATA[In a postcolonial country such as Malaysia, English plays an important role in governance, education and popular culture. With English now becoming the lingua franca of the globalized world, many Malaysian urban families use English to speak to their children at home, as well as the Malay language or other ethnic languages (Mabella, 2013). Recognizing the important relationship between the two languages, this paper investigates the early bilingual development of Malay and English. This paper, focusing specifically on the development of plural marking in Malay and English in a child raised in two languages that are typologically distant and express plurals differently; Malay plurals are expressed in various forms of reduplication and English plurals are typically morphologically marked on nouns with suffix /-s/. But how does the child manage to learn, simultaneously, such divergent systems? In order to shed some light on this question, a child growing up bilingually in these two languages was audio and video recorded in each language over 5 months, that is from 3 years 4 months (3;04 ) to 3 years 9 months (3;09). Results suggest that though the child appears to develop two distinct systems of pluralities in Malay and English, the two developing grammars also manifest cross-linguistic influences.]]