january2010: So how does that work really? I speak different languages too, but for me they really stand on their own.
This question becomes really fascinating IMO in the case of pidgin and creole languages. These languages typically form when an English, French or other colonial power arrives in a region with its own, indigenous language. Indigenous adults soon start to borrow words (especially nouns) from the colonial language, producing a pidgin.
The children of pidgin-speaking parents take their parent's vocabulary, but streamline the grammar into a new, cohesive language called a creole.
From what I've read, the truly remarkable aspect of creole languages is that they all tend to be grammatically very similar, regardless of the indigenous and colonial 'parent' languages. Noam Chomsky took this remarkable fact as evidence for his "Language Acquisition Device" hypothesis.
(The LAD hypothesis argues that all children are born with a hard-wired, innate, universal grammar - a LAD - which they use to organise and make sense of the language that they hear as young children.
As mentioned, the existence of a LAD would explain the similarity of creole grammars, but it would also explain the similarity of the mistakes made by young children, while they're learning their own native language, regardless of what that language may be. For example, I've read that the kinds of errors that young children make when learning Japanese, follow very similar
grammatical patterns to the kinds of mistakes that children make when learning Spanish.
For more information, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammarespecially "Section 4. Presence of creole languages")
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