Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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Both groups were then asked to rate the importance of a number of factors that had been mentioned in definitions of bilingualism, such as being fluent in two languages, having both speaking and writing fluency in them, using two languages regularly, etc. The scale used went from 1 “not important” to 5 “very important.” The monolinguals gave a mean rating of 4.7 for being fluent in two languages, and the bilinguals gave it a rating of 4.4. Speaking and writing fluency in two languages was given a rating of 4.0 by the monolinguals and 3.6 by bilinguals, and equal fluency in two languages was rated 3.7 and 4.1 by the two groups, respectively. Thus, once again both monolinguals and bilinguals felt that fluency in two languages is an important factor in describing the bilingual person.

It is interesting to note that monolinguals differed most from bilinguals on the question of language use, a factor that we will evoke often in this chapter. For monolinguals, the factor labeled “regular use of two languages” received a mean rating of 3 (that is, it was not considered a very important factor), but the bilinguals gave it a mean rating of 4.1, just below “fluency in two languages” (4.4). So here, on language use, monolinguals and bilinguals diverged a bit, probably because bilinguals are more aware of the communicative aspect of being bilingual, that is, using two languages irrespective of your fluency in them.