Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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In the second part, we will present important characteristics of bilingual people (language proficiency, language use, functions of languages, language mode, etc.) and will also examine how they evolve over time. We will end with a quick overview of three well known self-report questionnaires given to bilinguals and see what they have in common and where they differ.

When I wrote my first book on bilingualism some 40 years ago (Grosjean 1982), I conducted a short survey in order to uncover the lay person’s understanding of the term “bilingual.” I asked a number of monolingual college students to answer this question: “If someone told you that X was bilingual in English and French, what would you understand by that?” The most frequent response I found (36% of the answers) was that X speaks both languages fluently. This was followed by X speaks English and French (21%), and by X understands and speaks English and French (18%)? Note that the summed percentages of the two latter answers, which basically say the same thing, add up to 39%. The same question asked of a group of bilinguals gave very similar results: X speaks the two languages fluently (31%), and speaks the two languages (46%). Thus, just speaking both languages (which includes both production and perception), gets a bit less than half of the responses in the two groups, and speaking both languages fluently is only just behind, with 36% and 31% respectively. This shows the importance of fluency¹ in the participants’ mind, be they monolingual or bilingual.