The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Francois Grosjean

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Countries

      In 2012, a survey conducted for the European Commission interviewed some 26,751 respondents in 27 member states of the European Union. The results appeared in a report that same year, Europeans and their languages (TNS Opinion & Social 2012 ). Even though not as a complete as a census with good language questions (but see above for the problems many have), it is a fine base to get a feel for the status of bi- and multilingualism in Europe. The report contains several sections and we will concentrate once again on language knowledge, and on language use, so as to be able to compare, when possible, the results with those from North America.

      To the language knowledge question, “… which other languages, if any, do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation?,” 54% of the respondents are able to hold a conversation in at least one additional language, 25% are able to speak at least two additional languages, and 10% are conversant in at least three languages. This confirms what everyone knows: many Europeans know other languages! Of course, there is a great deal of variability with countries like Luxemburg, Latvia, The Netherlands, Malta, Slovenia and Sweden having percentages of “at least one other language” above 90%, and countries like Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Portugal having less than 40%. English dominates as the most common language that Europeans are most likely to be able to speak (38%), followed by French (12%), German (11%), Spanish (7%) and Russian (5%).

      With regard to language use, Europeans and their languages gives some interesting results. As we saw above, 54% of Europeans mentioned one other language when asked the question about the additional languages they speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation. But when asked, “How often to do you use your first additional language?,” the mean percentage dropped down to 24% for everyday or almost everyday use. Thus, one in four Europeans are bilingual. Of course, once again there is a lot of variation, with percentages as high as 67% for Luxemburg, 49% for Malta, 44% for Latvia, 41% for Denmark, and so on, and as low as 7% for Portugal, 9% for Italy (but keep in mind that many Italians are bilingual in a regional dialect and Italian), and 11% for Poland. Two of the countries we discussed in the first part of this chapter, Belgium and the United Kingdom, have 29% and 28% respectively.

      France and Switzerland are worth discussing separately. For France, the percentage given for daily or almost daily use is 19%, a figure that is very close to that of a large survey, “Etude de l’histoire familiale,” conducted in France itself in 1999 by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). Three language questions were asked, and the third one gets at what we are interested in: “… do you find yourself talking with people close to you (partner, parents, friends, colleagues, store keepers…) in a language other than French? If so, which is it/are they?.” The first thing to note was that some 400 different languages were mentioned, a number that clearly shows that France is multilingual even though officially it is monolingual. There are regional languages, but most with far fewer speakers than before, and many immigrant languages such as Arabic, Berber, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and so on. And to the question asked, 21% of the respondents stated that they speak a language other than French in their everyday life. We should note that many more inhabitants in France’s overseas territories use two languages regularly: 57% in Mayotte, 41% in New Caledonia, 38%, on Reunion Island, and so on.

      Other fascinating results accompanied this new finding. First, the majority of these respondents were bilingual (26.1%), others were trilingual (10.4%) and still others quadrilingual (3.7%). As for the languages concerned, the greater number of bilinguals were Swiss German/German speakers, as expected, and the greater number of trilinguals concerned speakers of these two languages along with English. These new results were published in Grosjean (2013).

      Estimating the Percentage of Bilinguals in the World

      One day, as I was watching Dr. Kim Potowski, Associate Professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, give her TEDx talk, “No child left monolingual” (Potowski 2013), I heard her say, “Now the fact is that 65% of the world today is bilingual or multilingual….” I was intrigued by this sudden jump in numbers and so I wrote to Dr. Potowski to ask her what the source was for her figure. She kindly replied that she had found it in a book published in 2002 which I immediately consulted, but I had no success finding the figure. I left it at that although her number seemed really high to me.

      More than a year later, it was a pleasant surprise to hear from Dr. Potowski again who told me that she had finally found the source. The figure had been given by Colin Baker and his colleague, Sylvia Prys Jones, both of Bangor University in Wales, in the Preface to their monumental The Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (1998). In it, they state, “… around two-thirds of the world’s population are bilingual.”

      So the next stage in my quest was to write to Colin Baker to ask him where they had obtained that figure, or how they had worked it out. Over several exchanges of emails, he explained to me how they had guesstimated the figure. They put together a rough spreadsheet with estimates of each country’s bilingual population. They used Ethnologue, THE source about languages in the world today, to which they added several other sources. At the time, the language sources were incomplete (e.g.,

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