The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Francois Grosjean. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Francois Grosjean
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119602415
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which often grouped together a national language and a dialect such as “German or Swiss German.”

      As I stated in an article at the time (Grosjean 2012), the people who thought of the question clearly had a very restrictive view of bilingualism. It was assumed that people have one main language and that if they have another main language, then they must know it very well. In addition, it was stipulated that one must think in each of one’s languages to be able to list them. The fact that thinking can take place independently of language and can be visual-spatial, or involve non-linguistic concepts, was not taken into account. Also, speakers of both Swiss German and German, among others, were given just one language category to check and hence could not list their two languages. And yet, the majority of Swiss Germans (close to two-thirds of Swiss people) use both Swiss German and German in their everyday lives and are de facto bilingual.

      The outcome was that Swiss Statistics stated that a mere 15.8% of the Swiss population was bi- or multilingual. This was less than the percentages found in largely monolingual countries such as the United States and France (around 20% of bilinguals at the time). And yet, any visitor to Switzerland will have noticed how extensive bi- and multilingualism is in the country with people often using two or more languages in their everyday lives, and knowing at least one other learned in school. In the next part, we will see how the other questions in the Swiss Census allowed us to estimate a truer percentage of bilinguals.

      In sum, finding out how many bilinguals there are in a country is particularly difficult. Some countries do not have language questions, others do but they are few in number and the results have little to say about bilingualism, and others still have enough questions but the data is not analyzed adequately so as to get at the extent of bilingualism in the country.

      The Proportion of Bilinguals in a Number of Countries

      In this part, we report on the state of bilingualism of the inhabitants of a number of countries. National censuses, or large language surveys, offer data from which estimates of bilingualism can be worked out based either on language use, or language knowledge (potential bilinguals are also included here), or both.

      The United States

      I have always been fascinated by the state of bilingualism in the United States maybe because I lived there for many years and one of its eminent scholars, Einar Haugen, himself a Norwegian-English bilingual, became a close colleague and friend. As stated above, the US Census Bureau does not keep track of bilingualism as such, but ever since 1980, and annually since 2000 with the American Community Survey (ACS), three language questions are asked (see the preceding part), and they allow us to work out, to a large extent, who is bilingual and where bilinguals are situated.

      The 2018 ACS found that 67.3 million inhabitants (native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants) spoke a language other than English at home (Zeigler and Camarota 2019). Among those people, some 63 million also knew and used English and hence were bilingual. This represents 20.55% of the population. If we add to this number bilingual children under 5 (not covered by the survey) as well as people who use a second or third language in their everyday lives but only English at home, then probably close to 23% of the population can be considered bilingual.

      Figure 2.1 The percentage of bilinguals, and of inhabitants who know no English, since 1980 in the United States.

      Bilingualism in the US is very diverse. English-Spanish bilinguals represent 61% of all bilinguals and hence Spanish is definitely America’s second language (41,460,427 speakers in 2018). Other important languages, but to a far lesser extent, are Chinese (3,471,604), Tagalog (1,760,468), Vietnamese (1,542,473), Arabic (1,259,118), French (1,232,173) and Korean (1,086,335). Bilinguals are not equally distributed across the nation. Some states contain proportionally very few (e.g., West Virginia, Mississippi, Montana, Kentucky) whereas others have a far greater proportion (e.g., California, Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, etc.). As for cities, the ones with the most bilinguals are Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Phoenix and Chicago.

      Bilingualism in the United States has traditionally been transitional – a passage, over one or two generations, from monolingualism in a minority language to monolingualism in English. However, there is an increasing awareness that the country’s knowledge of the languages of the world is a natural resource that should not be wasted. Hence a growing number of families are fostering bilingualism either by making sure the home’s minority language and culture are kept alive or by encouraging their children to acquire and use a second language.

      Canada