Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн
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Switzerland also has a national census that asks the right sort of questions, although fewer than Canada, and that allows one to get at the proportion of bilinguals in the country if done correctly. But here problems occur with how Swiss Statistics define bilingualism. I will concentrate on the first language question as it is the data obtained with this question that was used by the agency in 2012 to estimate the number of bi- or multilinguals in the country.8 Here is a translation of the question: “What is your main language, i.e. the language in which you think and that you know the best? If you think in several languages and know them very well, then name these languages.” This was followed by a number of language categories 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.