Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн
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In sum, bi- and multilingualism is extensive, and wherever one goes in the world, one meets people who know and use two or more languages or dialects. Is this reflected in the national statistics of countries that house these people?
On the Difficulties of Counting People Who Are Bilingual
One could expect, perhaps naively, that countries would be interested in those who know and use several languages, and would make available statistics that reflect the bi- or multilingualism of their population. As we will see below, this is far from the case. In fact, finding out how many bilinguals there are in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and the United States, among many others, is a very real challenge.
Some nations simply do not have language questions in their censuses. Belgium and France are two examples of this. In Belgium, the last census that contained such questions was in 1947. Up to that date, the results had been used to either attend to inhabitants in their own language (if 30% of the population declared speaking a language other than the official language in the area in question) or to change the official language of the municipalities (if 50% of the population declared speaking it). But under the pressure of certain groups who did not want to accept language shifts in areas around Brussels, language censuses were abolished in Belgium in 1961. No official information about language knowledge and use has been obtained since then via the census. It is only by going to other information sources, such as European surveys of languages, that one can get an idea of the level of bilingualism in Belgium, as we will see in the next part.